


SHINBYEONG (And Heaven's Out of Sight)

by thewingedoctopus



Category: Killing Eve (TV 2018)
Genre: (with a stop in angry sex junction), F/F, and this will be headed to feelings town, chapter 14 the action picks up again thank fuck ahaha, chapter 18 the winky winky between our laaaadies, eve feeling her oates hey how are you, i love them both but by jove!, my take on what season 3 could be, this will be bloody, this will be gory
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-08-30
Updated: 2020-02-19
Packaged: 2020-09-30 21:16:40
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 19
Words: 47,626
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20453684
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thewingedoctopus/pseuds/thewingedoctopus
Summary: "She had to stay on the right side of the line, the law; she had to for her own soul and sake if not for the sanity that she held onto with as tight a grasp as she could now. Her chest and between her legs hummed as she breathed rapidly at the thought of finally ending their inevitable cycle.The path that had her ridding this world of a psychopathic killer with a heart of stone and ice and death no matter the cost was more than tempting now that she’d tasted lead and fear at the hands of someone she had once thought of as an equal (why or how had she ever thought that of them). Villanelle was dangerous; Eve was collateral damage. God would reward her in heaven for her sacrifices."Eve's new wound is proof enough that Villanelle, despite her grand gestures and proliferated shows of emotion, could never love anything, much less anyone. Perhaps she shouldn't be so lenient towards the self-assured assassin, like everyone had asked of her so many times before.Chapter 6: a reunion!





	1. Also Called "Self-Loss"

Eve had thought she’d heard wrong when the nurse had spoken up at her bedside. She’d looked up under one hooded eyelid and one swollen one. The woman’s heavy cockney accent had irritated her when she’d met her first her, then simply annoyed her as the hours turned into days. She’d satisfied herself with the thought that she’d never see this woman again once she was free. Instead of answering, she’d stared her down hard until she’d been left alone in her hospital bed, the woman’s tail between her legs as she’d scampered off. 

But the nurse’s advice had stuck out to her and now it tumbled around in her head more like a swarm of bees and less like the butterflies in her stomach. 

The winged flowers that they were had died long ago: killed by the gunpowder and the lead that had gutted her, pierced her from daylight to daylight, that had left her with a great big dark hole against her yellowed and bruised skin. That had left her with less intestinal walls and tubes than she’d left her marital home with. When she twisted the right way, she could feel where surgeons had cut into her and quartered out the diseased organ. Where they’d dug their gloved fingers and their forceps in searching for the cloth that had lost its way in her. The bullet had been clean through. 

She fingered the stray threads of shirt they’d coaxed out now. They’d wanted to throw the offending garment away but she’d stopped them from doing so, barely out of anesthetic shock and asking a passing nurse to clean the blood and bits of guts and flesh off of it. Her skin was slowly healing. Soon she’d be left with nothing left of _hers_ but this that had grazed the bullet now lost somewhere in between two bricks of ancient history. 

She couldn’t possibly have kept her rotting intestines in a jar, but by God it would have been one hell of a conversation starter. 

The nurse’s words ran through her head again like the lyrics to a bad 90s song that played too often in the new nightclubs downtown. _I suggest you try the local YMCA. It’ll get you in shape and it’ll keep the pain away later on._

It had offended her that the woman, even if accidentally, had suggested she was out of shape. She was even more offended that the YMCA had been mentioned. It was a place she had vowed never to step foot in; it reminded her too much of her own mother on early Sunday mornings with her friends, all elderly and all Asian. 

She didn’t even know where the fuck local _was_. 

She remembered the dawn light filtering through broken arches and around Corinthian columns and she remembered a blinding smile and then blinding pain, blinding white lights running from stomach to the backs of her eyes and back down to her spine. She remembered blues and reds and rocking waves and hurried Italian turning into hurried English and then this bed, this bed, this bed. 

An envelope had come for her with breakfast but she hadn’t cared enough to open it as she begrudgingly ate a staling muffin with a flavor she’d had three times now already. She’d searched it from corner to corner for any inkling as to her location but whoever had left it had delivered it by hand. She wished she could see out her window but her bed was fixed in the white walled room so that she couldn’t. She could see sky when it wasn’t raining and she could hear traffic. 

She ripped the letter open unceremoniously, not caring that the edges weren’t straight or neat. She’d sat too long in the same bed, questions gnawing at her with no answers in sight. As if on silver wings, here was some semblance of a response to her endless musings as she counted the tiles above her from dawn until dusk. 

Inside were three sheets of computer paper stapled together. The first was a newspaper clipping that had been ineffectively scanned and sloppily printed out again and she turned the page, not caring to read whatever the news were that _The Sun_ thought were worth anything. The second piece of paper she paused on, smoothing out the edge where the staple crumpled the corners. 

It was a divorce settlement issued by the London courts. An amicable agreement between one Niko Polastri and one Eve Polastri. Or, ex-Polastri. To her amazement she’d signed the dotted line at the bottom of the page. It was, after all, an easy enough of a signature to copy almost perfectly. It was inevitable, she assumed. She wondered if it was really Niko’s scrawl, but she didn’t have to look hard to know it was. 

The last page was a restraining order. 

That she hadn’t counted on. 

Again, it was her name and his and their signatures and Niko had been more confident in signing this one, she could tell, and her signature was unwavering in its depth and longing, copied almost hideously beneath his. Five hundred feet. She wondered who kept the house but flipping back a page gave her no more leads. She had to assume he kept it: after all, he had a job and she had, well, a divorce and no end in sight to the pain rippling in her abdomen. 

Had Niko been the one to propose these moves of action against her? Had he been happily drinking tea and filling out the necessary paperwork to let her go and keep her away or had he been forced for his own safety, sobbing as he complied to his assailants on the right side of the law? No tears dotted the pages.

Testily she flipped the sheets around so they were back to the clipping and she took a good and long hard look. 

And promptly threw up over the side of the bed. 

OOOoooOOO

If they let her watch television in her room, she might have known about this sooner. Surely Gemma would have made the 8 o’clock news, or at least the morning talk show post-jingles. The date was almost a month back but the facts remained the same and she read what tidbit of information that had been gifted to her over and over again. Sometimes aloud, sometimes slowly. 

If she had known about this before taking the plane to Italy, she might not have gotten on it at all. 

She might have actually been cross with Villanelle. 

Then again, she more than understood how the now deceased and rotting-in-the-ground woman was annoying in just the right way to fall into the assassin’s deadly lap. And fall out of it again, blue and blotchy. 

The thought of Villanelle crouching above her, hands tight around her windpipe and squeezing, squeezing, squeezing her breath away, made her heart skip like a scratched record. She could see the blonde in her mind’s eye, flawless face turning pink as she emulated her kill: holding her own breath as if she were that woman in the storage closet.

But what if she’d gone for her throat with metal instead of her fingers? Eve turned her head this way and the image shifted. Villanelle, green eyes colder than the blade in her hand as it slashed across her throat and splashed red over her features, her hair. She was drowning in blood as the blonde across her laughed underneath the rain of her arterial spurts. 

That way and the assassin held a noose loosely in one hand as she walked away from her. The rope pulled and pulled and then it was taut but she was firmly chained to the chair she sat in and Villanelle’s tugs became constant and insistent and then the line went over a bannister and she was being hoisted up by the power alone of the killer’s muscles and hate. 

When she tilted her head back and breathed out her guts spilled into Russian hands. It felt like the rope around her neck the way Villanelle pulled foot by foot of her intestines out, the parts sewn back together giving up halfway and spilling their contents on their laps. Strong fingers reached into the gaping hole beneath her chest and crawled up between her lungs slowly, pushing spleen and meaty bits out of the way before curling around her heart and ripping it out. She watched white canines sink into her beating flesh, wild grin never leaving Villanelle’s eyes.

Eve welcomed it all. She figured it wasn’t very therapeutic but then again she had nothing to do but read the article where her husband’s, ex-husband’s, face was plastered. It was almost ironic that he had ended up on the front page before she had. The bullet hadn’t gone through just right for her to get that honor. She was still alive. 

And so she daydreamed of all the ways Villanelle could watch her soul deteriorate behind her eyes before it crumpled like a soda can, crushed to death and thrown away over a careless shoulder. At least it would all be over. A welcomed ending to their wild cat-and-mouse now that she realized she had been the mouse all along and never the cat. 

Never the cat. 

Never anything. 

Villanelle was on a completely different level to Eve. Eve wasn’t even sure the girl was on the same plane of existence. Or if she was, it was a little bit to the left. 

Everything was a little bit to the left with Villanelle, all the time. 

The way she calculated the world around her, the way the words left her mouth after they’d bounced around in the hollow of her cranium. The way she walked. The way her eyes weren’t exactly centered in their sockets. 

The way she’d shot Eve in the left hemisphere of the body. 

A petulant child never agreeing to anything on the right side of anything. 

And Eve had followed across that vague line so many times now that she wasn’t sure she was right either. 

She had nothing tethering her to anything anymore that reminded her of before: Kenny and Elena and Jess far from wherever she lay in her bed, Hugo bleeding to death in the remnants of her memories. Bill was dead. Niko might as well have been. 

All she had left was the scars on her body and the smell of Villanelle’s bullet. Always the smell of her and her perfume. 

OOOoooOOO

Eve ignored the nurse like she always did, black eyes focused on the window instead as the heavy-set woman puttered around her. Sometimes the professional sighed as she picked up fallen pillows or blankets that the ex-special agent had thrown there in a fit of cabin fever but Eve had her reasoning: no answers? no cleaning after herself. 

The woman placed her daily medication on her bedside table and a bottle of water. Lunch wasn’t until much later and she readjusted Eve in between the covers before leaving, pen scratching on paper that had her name at the top and the date beneath fingers that she just couldn’t see for the life of her. 

The door closed and Eve finally smiled, pulling a pair of bandage scissors from underneath her sheets. The nurse hadn’t seen her swipe them and she felt a weird pang of pride hit her between her ribs. 

Villanelle had once said the biggest pain in her life was boredom. How it came in waves that never stopped their tidal flow and only ebbed slightly when she felt blood rush to her temples because she had the sticky red liquid flowing between her fingers. Eve thought she knew now what she meant by a boredom so long and unbroken that only something drastic could change it. She held the scissors up to the light: now there was something drastic. 

She thought it crazy that she would compare being cooped up in a hospital for days on end to multiple murders and maiming and mayhem. 

That night she waited long enough long past midnight and the initial round of the night nurses and she shuffled to the bathroom as best as she could in her cheap slippers. Whoever had thrown her in this modern prison had been kind enough to make sure she was in a singles room with her own toilet and shower. She thought then it might have been Carolyn after all since the woman wouldn’t have been such a monster to leave her in a room with other sick people, much less people who would ask questions about the woman shot abroad, but Carolyn had been adamant that she was out if she left with Villanelle and not her.

She stared at herself in the glossy mirror, beneath the harsh fluorescents. She’d read once somewhere online that one could tell what surfaces were one-way and which were two-way and she placed her fingers on the cool glass, checking like if there was any chance somebody was watching her. As if she were a bizarre experiment. Finally her slim fingers pulled her hair out of its rubber band and she let it flow free around her face, framing it and flying out in curls otherwise. She pulled strands this way and that. 

Villanelle loved her mass of hair but had never actually ran her hands through it, bloody or not. Eve saw it now with rivers of red slicking it back and she grabbed a handful by her ear and she pulled until it was taut. Her scalp stung lightly. 

She cut it off, the black strands falling in clumps to the floor like lightweight feathers as she cut and cut and cut with the rather sharp edges of the scissors. 

When she finished, chest heaving and breath rattling, she looked at herself in the mirror. She’d left some length on top and in the back so she could pull it back in a short ponytail still but she’d shaved the sides as best as she could with what she had. 

She laughed. 

She looked fucking ridiculous.

She was woken up hours later by a shrill scream and her sheets being torn off her body. She went to cover her intimate parts even though she was wearing those awful hospital linen pyjamas and she stared, dumbfounded, at the nurse at her bedside. She’d screamed back, afraid for her life before realizing where she was. 

Her shearing her hair went far from unnoticed or well-received. She had no answer to give when asked why, and she certainly wouldn't tell them how she had managed to get the act done. She wouldn’t lie of her own volition but thankfully she was asked if she’d torn it out. 

With black eyes wide and unable to find another excuse, she nodded wordlessly. Then confidently.

“Yes,” she’d said slowly. “That’s exactly what I did. Tore it right out.” She’d blinked like an owl. It was convincing enough.

She heard the ward’s doctor yelling at the nurse from the hallway afterwards. What if she had hurt herself? What if she had hurt one of the staff? The cold metal of the scissors rested against her palm, hidden under her pillow. She hadn’t even thought of that. Villanelle would have. In fact, the blonde would have been out already: she’d shown her prowess in that Parisian hospital once before. But a knife wound, however deep, wasn’t the same as being shot. Was it?

Anyway, it was mostly healed and yet there was no end in sight to her confinement, no planned date for her to start physiotherapy, and she almost wondered if they planned to keep her long enough that she would actually go mad and she’d have to be sedated and brought to a mental institute. 

She thought back to the badly produced PowerPoint presentation they’d gotten from that one psychiatrist, her thoughts lingering a little too long on the picture of Villanelle she’d come to look at much too often (ugly bandana and all), and she recalled the list of psychopathic traits. She wasn’t a psychopath in the sense that she ticked off the list like the assassin did, but God had she enjoyed watching a bad man die. In that moment, she was Fearlessness, she was Carefree Nonplanfulness.

Raymond was scum of the earth. 

She tried to reconcile herself with that very idea every time she wished her hands were bloody again, every time she wanted just a hint of that power she’d had. Villanelle had wanted him dead to save her own ass: she’d wanted Eve to do it because it was a power trip for her, a way to hold her under her thumb. Eve had wanted him dead to save their collective asses: she’d wanted to do it because bad men didn’t deserve to exist. 

And yet she’d let Villanelle live for so long, running free and killing all because she liked watching her go about her work. 

She bit the inside of her cheek, biting it raw until it bled and turned her mouth into copper. Her boring life turned upside down by piercing green eyes and a full teethed grin. A boring life she hadn’t minded upended by the lithe feline that was the blonde. Why was that? she wondered that every day, every hour, with every passing thought that belonged to Villanelle. 

She had to stay on the right side of the line, the law; she had to for her own soul and sake if not for the sanity that she held onto with as tight a grasp as she could now. Her chest and between her legs hummed as she breathed rapidly at the thought of finally ending their inevitable cycle. 

The path that had her ridding this world of a psychopathic killer with a heart of stone and ice and death no matter the cost was more than tempting now that she’d tasted lead and fear at the hands of someone she had once thought of as an equal (why or how had she ever thought that of them). Villanelle was dangerous; Eve was collateral damage. God would reward her in heaven for her sacrifices. 

Villanelle had once said they were the same; it wasn’t true at the time, but now she knew it was the only way. To kill a killer, you had to become one. 

She wanted to win her autonomy back, she wanted to be just Eve again, not Eve and Villanelle or Villanelle and Eve and she knew she had to kill whatever was left of herself, mind and soul if not body: what was let of that husk of hers was sitting in a bassinet somewhere, guts and blood. 

Because she wouldn’t give Villanelle the satisfaction of killing her.

She’d do it herself. 

But first she had to get out of this hospital.


	2. You Make Me Mad, I'm Fire Again

Eve padded through the deserted hallway in the dead of night, scissors hidden in the crook of her elbow in her gaudy hospital sleeve.

She’d played poker for so many years with Niko and his (their) friends that she’d learned the tricks that weren’t meant to be taught. Cheating wasn’t allowed in their non-official competitions but when they’d had too many to drink it’d became a pastime for them: trying to figure out how they got around to pulling cards out of the air. Niko had shown her this one trick and if it worked with a card, it worked with what passed for a knife in her book. 

She just had to flick her arm the right way and it would come crashing between forearm and wrist into her waiting palm: if she did it right, anyway. She didn’t want to have to, the buzzing in her ears was hurting her head and she wanted to throw up at the mere thought of having to pull the scissors out against anyone, much less the nurses and doctors she’d had to face for the last weeks. She didn’t like them but they didn’t deserve to feel the excruciating pain she’d gone through. Even if the scissors were rather short and dull. 

She hobbled along the wall whilst trying to keep her weight clear off the hips, which was damn near impossible. The hallway was deserted which left her breathing a little easier but still her hands shook as she followed the white bricks down and around the corners. 

It occurred to her only now that she didn’t actually know her way around the building. Fire exit plans, those she knew were necessary in anything resembling public works. The nearest elevators had such a thing as well as her floor number and even if she could have just taken the lift down to the lobby they wouldn’t just let her walk out, so she searched for the fire exits.

But those would ring as soon as she crossed the threshold, wouldn’t they?

With rising panic she remembered she wasn’t Villanelle, a woman without a plan and not a care in the world. She needed a plan. She needed to care. She began a mental checklist.

Where were her things? She had her wallet on her when she’d been in Rome and she had some cash left if not her credit cards. Would Niko or Carolyn have wiped her bank accounts? She needed to find out and she was lucky in that most hospitals had ATMs near their cafeterias. She just had to make it down there. Wallet, ATM, what else?

A way out. A way out without making the alarms blare, without walking around the lobby, without letting the cameras keep track of her. She turned towards the fire exit map again, searching the corners with narrowed eyes for the building’s address, almost as if an afterthought.

Exeter. 

In Exeter there was a hospital, and a YMCA. That, she knew. The rest she’d figure out later. 

She began to walk back to her room, noting the eerily quiet hallway as she tiptoed around and read each door sign. The floor pharmacy; would she need anything? She didn’t want to steal; she could visit a grocery store later if her stitches itched or wrung her insides in pain. 

It was another door that made her pause, her ear against the cool wood feet away from her the nurses’ station. There was snoring coming from inside but it wasn’t a patient’s room; the door didn’t have any number to it or any plaque. 

She could always say she was sleepwalking.

She braved her way past the doorframe, peering into the dark room illuminated solely by the light from the hallway filtering in. A doctor slept in one of the corners, crumpled up inside a hollow armchair with his white coat thrown over the back of it. Eve thought she could spy blood splattered on its front, near his nametag, and she closed the door again, leaving him to sleep his exhaustion away. 

There was no more reason to hang around the deserted hallway; she didn’t have a plan. She traipsed down the hallway in her socks as quietly as she could, almost breaking into a run near the end as her heart raced her feet. She felt as if demons followed her in the guise of harried whispers and she almost slammed her hospital room door behind her. It came half an inch to doing so, her hand grabbing around the handle to stop it. She paused a moment, ear listening out for the gurgling of blood, one black eye trained on the couple down the hallway. They were the whispers she had heard; they hadn’t seen her. A nurse and a security guard. 

Said guard shifted on the balls of his feet as he yawned and stretched. “I’m grabbing a nap, Brenda. You goin’ to be okay?” The nurse replied to him with a voice too soft for Eve to hear, but it was watching him that was interesting. He walked into the room she’d just been in before, where the doctor slept, his jacket over his shoulder and most likely headed for a wall hook. 

OOOoooOOO

“Hi, uh, I’m new here,” Eve said. She hid her trembling hands underneath the desk. “I wanted to put my things away in the designated storage lockers but it seems I have to purchase my own lock,” she laughed nervously. “I wasn’t told.”

The secretary seemed to think for a moment before sighing heavily. “Yeah, that happens. Right then, we have a room where we store the patients’ belongings, if you’d like to try there.” She handed her a card key. 

Eve nodded, tugging on the bottom of her, the, security guard jacket she was wearing. She was lucky she fit. It was big around the shoulders but it gave her room to breathe. She took small steps; strides made her wound ache and she shuffled along behind the other woman, thanking her when she was lead and left to one of the larger rooms in the hospital, each locker with a room number attached, along with the names of the patients. 

It had taken her two days to weigh the pros and the cons of stealing and evading but as her skin had itched and her mind raced after the likeness of the huntress she wanted to hunt down with her own talons and nothing else, she’d decided it was the better option of the two. She couldn’t just rot away any longer. It was another three days of watching the nurses and doctors and guards come and go, mentally writing down who came and when, and the next night at three in the morning she’d stolen into the floor’s lounge and she’d sneaked out with a brand new navy blue jacket and pants. She’d slept well considering the lump of clothes she’d hidden under her mattress. 

From there it had been a bait and switch with a brand-new colleague of hers as the hospital staff pondered over the mystery of the missing uniform, taken right under a sleeping man’s nose. A technique she’d learned from Bill. 

She hated thinking of him. 

So she didn’t.

She made her way at a quick pace towards the room she’d been shown towards, tucking her cap farther down her forehead as she passed patients and nurses alike. She’d easily tucked her shortened hair beneath it: it had helped her get to the elevator without being seen and helped her hide out near the lobby as she made rounds she thought a security guard would make. She had been so rancid with the nursing staff that they’d stopped checking on her in the morning: she hadn’t eaten breakfast in weeks and even if this was a breach in policy, they couldn’t stand her anymore. She couldn’t stand herself anymore. None had been the wiser. She had the entire morning to sneak away.

The room was large and deep and her room locker was far down in the aisles. The card key worked and she thought for a moment that maybe it worked on all of the little metal doors. Her locker was mostly empty, save for clothes she recognized as the ones she’d been wearing that day in Rome in a bag marked by police post-it notes. Evidence of a time long past. Her wallet was hidden behind the sack.

She ruffled through it but found no ID, no credit or debit cards. Just cash. Loads of it. She stashed it into her pockets. Had Carolyn left it there as an eventual pick-me-up? Had Villanelle, perhaps hoping she would live after all, perhaps hoping she would forgive her? She didn’t care to count the amount: it would never be enough from either of the women. As if on cue the pain in her side suddenly doubled, making her heave for breath and crash her hand against the cabinets, holding tight and knuckles turning white. Her vision turned red and she swallowed the coppery taste of failure down. 

She needed fresh air, she needed to breathe and walk and run.

She walked the hallways back to the lobby, nodding in thanks at the secretary who eyed her not unkindly. The front door was right there, she was so near.

“Ma’am? Ma’am.”

Eve glanced over her shoulder and tensed. Blonde hair and green eyes. She started to curl her fingers into a fist.

It wasn’t Villanelle.

She began to move out of the way for the mother and her boy bleeding profusely from a head wound, red pouring down the back of his shirt like she’d seen it done before in pictures and in real life but the woman pressed the flat of her hand to her forearm, effectively pausing her. 

“Could you direct us to the pediatric ward, please?”

Eve blinked and glanced around. “Oh, uh, yes, of course.” She beat herself mentally for forgetting to even act the part she deemed herself witty enough to play. “It’s over here.” The front doors seemed to mock her as they opened and closed automatically with the passing crowds and she felt her mind stutter as she walked away from the lobby, followed by the pair. She scanned the elevator, the signs against the walls, the arrows on the floor leading everywhere and nowhere in all the colors of the rainbow.

She suddenly turned, embarrassed. “I’m sorry, I’m new here, I don’t actually know where the ward is,” she said. She held her breath, gauging the woman’s reaction. 

“Oh!”

She held the conversation with the woman in autopilot, fingers itching and knees practically shaking in anticipation. When she passed the lobby again she pressed her knuckles to the tip of her cap and saluted the secretary.

“I uh, I’m taking my cigarette break,” she told the woman. She shrugged, taking an exaggerated British accent when she was eyed curiously. “Fag break.”

And then,

Freedom.

OOOoooOOO

The ex-special agent had had more than enough money to settle into a dirty motel room for the night. If the lackluster appearance of the place kept Villanelle at bay, both in her thoughts and in reality, it was the computer room down in the office’s cellar that had interested her when she’d walked past the elongated building as dusk approached.

She just wanted a bed and a toilet and a sink to wash her wounds in. The Windows Vista system with a noisy internet connection downstairs was just a bonus; as was the counter clerk who hadn’t cared enough to ask her for an ID or a credit card. She paid in cash for three nights and she’d asked to be left alone. He hadn’t really seemed the type to bother anyone anyway. 

The mattress creaked under her weight and she held her breath momentarily, fingers tight around the remote control in her hand, before settling back and finally catching her breath. It felt like she hadn’t felt air in her lungs in days and they burned as she thought about her escapades. She almost laughed at the image of her in that godawful navy-blue suit but she was too hungry to do so. 

It was fair enough for the price she had paid that the small television in the upper corner of the room only had a handful of the national channels and she settled for an old documentary about animals as background noise while she rifled and counted the pound notes that had been left in her wallet. 

The Korean woman ordered a pizza delivered to her room and gorged herself on it. She’d lost weight on the liquid diet at the hospital and the smell that came from the box made her mouth water and she had it sprawled on the bed sheets before she stripped down to her underwear. 

She ate with both hands, reaching into the box with one for a slice as she finished another with the other. As she pulled the cheese began to stretch apart at the seams and she watched it avidly, chewing absently. The tomato sauce dripped off, splattered into the box and her stomach suddenly lurched at the image and her mouth suddenly felt much too full. She coughed it back as she continued to chew, trying to rapidly swallow so her airway could be free. She almost wanted to throw her fingers into the back of her throat. 

Finally, Eve breathed. 

She took her time that night washing her fingernails: the paste had gotten into her beds and she scrubbed hard trying to get the red and then orange off. It was considerably harder than blood and yet she’d spent quite some time rubbing that off at the time. She slept fitfully, hands crammed under the pillow. 

Dawn woke her; the curtains barely filtered out the sunlight and the smog and she decided on a morning promenade before she even thought of eating, the night before’s late and heavy dinner still splitting her wound open. The walk was laborious: every step made her taut stitches pull and she sweated large cold droplets down her back and past her eyebrows. 

She was lucky that near enough and past the corner of the motel was a breakfast terrace belonging to a small neighborhood café. It was with a heavy huff that she collapsed into a chair: there was no way she could make it back to the motel just yet. 

And so Eve stared ahead and people watched and accepted the small expresso and croissant given to her by the eagle-eyed waitress. She tore into it how she thought a maniac would: eating the nibs of both ends first and then unraveling the pastry dough that had been swirled on itself by the baker and separating the outer shell from its innards. She ate it bit by bit, from the outside in. She thought of eating skin that way: fried like her mother used to make the pork belly when she was in need of comfort food. Like when she’d had her heart broken for the first time.

By Jove did she miss skin.

The thought suddenly made her retch and she dove for her coffee, spluttering the dark liquid down her throat and burning her tongue as she struggled not to vomit her breakfast. 

She heaved herself to her feet and dropped coins on the little garden table, next to the half-eaten croissant even as her stomach rumbled in both disgust and hunger. She had thought of Villanelle. She couldn’t even finish a damn pastry without thinking of the murderer or murder or tearing into guts with her bared teeth and loins on fire. 

She really had to get rid of that monster. She invaded her dreams her days her nights, more so than she ever had before. Was it still an obsession if she didn’t want it?

Why didn’t she want it anymore?

What was _it_?

The kraken woman herself? The feeling of blood between each of her fingers? The guts she wished she could hold in her own two hands? The weight of the wooden axe on her conscience? God, the axe. Where was it now? Had it been taken into custody by Carolyn or Kenny? The thought of the skittish young man with the weapon made her suddenly sad. She hoped he’d been wearing gloves and a mask: she couldn’t bare the thought of him having to touch anything that had come out of a body like she had. 

Did she miss the axe or the butterfly knife more? Both had had the same result: pain and suffering and so much red everywhere. She wished now she’d finished the job with the knife. She wouldn’t be in this mess. 

She trudged her way back to the motel in a cold, light rain. There was a long way until lunch and so she bypassed her room and went to the main office to ask for access to the computer room. She gave over her room key in exchange for the new key. Aptly named, it only had one device. 

The Korean woman went ahead and searched her own name in the URL bar once the computer and internet had booted up but nothing came up. She almost sighed in relief: at least she wasn’t the six o’clock news scapegoat to some grisly assassination. Villanelle was nothing but a perfume to the outside world, and the girl’s birth name gave nothing up either. She searched Rome and murders and nothing fit her peculiar situation. It almost bothered her how after everything they were still invisible, most likely to Carolyn’s pride and Kenny’s dexterity. 

She searched the local bus times and finally, on a whim of curiosity and false hope she decided to check her bank account. She didn’t care now if British Intelligence would trace her, she’d be gone soon anyway. Her heart sank: her login number didn’t even register as a valid number. 

With pain shooting up her side she waited for the office clerk at the counter, leaning heavily up against it as he helped another lodger. She had time to waste and so she smiled at him softly to take as long as he needed; she didn’t know what the person wanted or needed but they sounded upset so she took the time to breathe and expand her lungs and the skin around her wound, stretching it. The front door opened and closed behind her and she listened to the jingle of the bell without turning around. 

“Finally!” a woman said. “I thought we’d never get out of that rain.” There was a light chuckle from a man. 

Eve froze, fingers curling around the edge of the counter. It was a harsh London accent but the tone was light and airy and familiar and it froze her to her core. She began to reach for the pen in her coat pocket and uncapped it. 

“Don’t let the umbrella drag, dear, you’re getting water everywhere.” the woman said. The couple’s footsteps came closer and Eve began to panic. “Doesn’t this remind you of Paris-“

“What the fuck, lady!”

Eve was shoved and she fought for her footing but her hand never wavered and she swallowed thickly as she rested the sharp end of the pen against the hollow of the woman’s stomach. The sweater rippled in fear and something else and finally Eve looked up, furious.

It wasn’t Villanelle. 

She stumbled back and dropped the makeshift weapon. It clattered to the ground with a deafening sound as she threw up her apologies holding her hands up and moving to fix the woman’s jacket. She was pushed away. 

Eve threw the computer room key at the boy behind the counter and he threw her room ones back. 

She had no one left, no money save for an egregious amount of pound notes that would disappear quicker than she aimed for it to, and if she had been making allusions to death before now she heard and saw her in plain waking hours. 

But she had bus times out of the city and she had an address etched and burned into her mind like the day she’d first read it.

She’d pay Konstantin a visit.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> If you have any feedback I'd love to hear it! Thank you so much for reading!


	3. I Hate this City, but I Stay 'Cause of You

He hadn’t left the safe house he’d been assigned, though now the security had been toned down since the original threat was mostly gone. Still, he had a police officer in an unmarked car pass by every hour. Eve waited between two of those shifts before making her way up the driveway and the little stairs so that she could knock on the door. A heavy-set woman in her late forties, conventionally pretty, opened the door a crack and peered at Eve. When the Korean woman explained in vague terms who she was, Konstantin appeared like a spirit bear in the background, looming over them all. He showed her to the kitchen.

Eve dragged an oaken chair back and sat heavily at the kitchen table, fingers finding her bandages and pressing into her side. She heard Konstantin mutter in Russian to the woman whom she finally guessed was his wife and he stepped into the room a moment later. The door shut behind him and he pawed at his beard as he looked her up and down, itching it this way and that. 

“Are you hungry, Eve?” he said. “I can find you something to eat.”

“No.”

He shrugged but reached for the bread at the corner of the marble countertop anyway and started to work on the twisted end of the plastic bag. “I’m assuming there is a reason as to your showing up here.”

“You wouldn’t be wrong.”

“She left you behind, then. In Rome?”

Eve glanced at him. “No.”

His eyebrows raised in question and concern and intrigue but he said nothing, watching her over the slice he was preparing with a healthy, copious amount of Nutella. He noticed her watching and he shrugged again, smiling. “Irina has bad habits, and now so do I. Life is short.” He reached for another slice and began to spread more Nutella. “That day, in Rome, I had told her to leave you behind. I am glad she did not. I enjoy you, Eve.”

“You asked her to leave me for dead?”

“For dead?” he repeated. “I asked her to leave you to Carolyn.” He waved his hands. “I would not want you dead.”

Eve stared at him incredulously. “You don’t know, do you?” 

He looked up at her, biting the inside of his cheek. “Know what?”

“Konstantin,” Eve said. “Where’s Villanelle?”

His smiled stayed but there was no mirth left. “You do not know where she is?”

“I wouldn’t be here asking if I did, would I?”

The man blinked and put down his butter knife. His voice was strained. “You don’t know _where she is_?”

“You don’t either!” Eve snapped back accusingly. “What the _fuck_, Konstantin!”

“I am not her handler anymore, Eve!” he laughed. “You are!”

The Korean woman froze, eyes trained furiously on the aging man in front of her. Carolyn had never put it in such words but now thrown into her face in such a way…

“Were,” she said.

He regarded her curiously now as he reached for the spread jar. “What happened, Eve?”

She slumped forward in her chair, all energy drained out of her. “I killed a man,” she murmured. Konstantin braced himself on the counter, breathing out harshly. “She, Villanelle, she made me kill a man.”

“Made you?”

Eve’s curls shook as she nodded slowly, her face turning an off shade of pale. “He was strangling her and she was going to die if I didn’t do anything. I grabbed the axe-“ Konstantin didn’t have to ask who she meant. “I grabbed it, Konstantin, and I struck him.” She looked up at him. “She told me to. She was going to die, Konstantin.”

“That was a very noble thing to do,” he tried.

“And she had a gun on her, goddammit, she had a gun on her the entire time and she made me _murder_ a man because she wanted me to, what, be her? Be like her? Be stuck with her?” Eve’s voice rose. “Be under her control until she finally killed me? Fuck that, Konstantin! Fuck that!”

He scratched his beard. “Eve-“

“She shot me!” the woman yelled. “Your pet shot me!” She scrambled to tug her shirt up, bunching it under her armpits and standing. Her head buzzed heavily and her eyesight swam but she grabbed at her bandages and ripped it off. The wounds were just scarring over and the edges began to bleed. They stared each other down as Eve breathed heavily, twisting her body so he could see both the in and the out of where the bullet had gone through, tearing her apart. 

“She does that,” Konstantin said. 

Eve stared and finally she collapsed into her chair, spent. They fell silent as the clock on the wall ticked by. Konstantin took another slice and spread on as Eve’s shirt started to imbibe the blood on her belly. It stung and she arched lightly, pressing her hand to her back. 

“Do you think she knows I’m alive?” Eve asked.

“If she left you for dead, she meant for you to be dead,” he said softly. “She was rather surprised to see me alive after she shot me in the heart.” He shook his head at the thought, chuckling darkly. 

“She didn’t aim for my heart,” she muttered. “But I will.”

Konstantin’s head shot up. “What?”

“I’m going to kill her.”

“Eve-“

“I’m going to rid this world of that psychopathic _dickswab_-!” Eve gazed down at her hand, the palm flat on the kitchen table where she’d slammed it down. She flexed her fingers and they ached. She hastily pushed her curls out of her face, suddenly embarrassed.

“Eve,” Konstantin admonished. “That is oak.”

“Where is she, Konstantin?”

He raised his eyebrows and his shoulders went up to his ears before falling back down in a motion as exaggerated as the crispness in his accent. “I told you, I do not know. I do not know and I have not searched for her. Believe it or not but she is bad for my health. My blood pressure and my,” he swept his hand over half-haphazardly over the growing pile of Nutella bread. “Cholesterol.” 

“Where do you think she is, then?”

“I have not even entertained the idea,” he admitted. He waved his knife at her. “She told me once she could not read minds but I am skeptic because when I think of her she appears to stabs me, or she shoots me, you know, blood, guts, _ouch_. She just shows up. Maybe you are not thinking of her hard enough,” he chuckled. 

“Fuck off, Konstantin,” she growled. She glanced at him. “What about the Twelve?”

“What about them.”

She scrambled to her feet and faced him across the kitchen island. “They would know where she is, wouldn’t they?”

“I do not know. I would hope not, they are not very happy with her since she worked with MI6. They are not very happy with me either. Which is why I live in this safe house, where I am supposed to be safe.” He eyed her. “I hope you have not brought anyone with you unknowingly.”

She ignored him. “Why would she care that they aren’t happy with her, she could kill them all if she wanted to.”

Konstantin barked out a laugh. “She could, couldn’t she.”

“Especially if they went through the trouble of sending members after her.”

The Russian paused. “Eve, do not.”

“If I have her believe she’s being targeted, she’ll come out of hiding to get rid of them before they get rid of her. I just have to follow her murder trail to her. Like I always have.” 

He rubbed at his forehead. “Neither of you are good for my health. You honestly believe she would fall for that?”

“She already did, she showed up at my house!” Eve rounded the countertop. 

“She’s egotistical and she’s proud and she’s a sucker for line, hook, and sinker. Konstantin, will you help me get the word out there?”

“You want me to help you kill her?” He was honestly surprised. “I love that girl.”

“Do you love me?”

“Less,” he admitted lightly. “Do you love me?” he echoed. She took a step closer, trying to appear as threatening as she could but it only made him smile. “I will never understand.”

“Understand what?” she said. 

“You are magnets, you and Villanelle. You are attracted yet you cannot stand to be together.”

“She’s a psychopathic serial killer, Konstantin. She doesn’t deserve to be with anyone,” Eve spat back. “And we both know prison would never hold her. It hasn’t before. It couldn’t.”

“There’s always Saint-Helena,” he mused back. “Ego meets ego.”

Eve grimaced. “Seriously?” He smiled widely at her and she couldn’t help but to smile back, hiding behind a curtain of hair. It was the first spark of joy she’d had in weeks. Months. “God, this is fucked up.”

Konstantin scoffed. “Yea.” He sobered. 

She held his gaze, black in grey. “I need to do this, Konstantin.”

“I know.” He finally put his butter knife in the sink. “I do love her. She was different, she always will be. But all good things come to an end, do they not? And she is much too good at what she does.”

“She doesn’t love you,” Eve said. 

He glanced at her. “You have to remember that, too. She does not love you.” Eve swallowed thickly, unable to meet his eyes. “When you are about to kill her, you have to remember that, whatever she decides to tell you. She will use your words against you. She is like a hydra, Eve. She won’t just go away.” He leant down slightly to be at the same height as her. “But you already know that, don’t you?” He crossed his arms and stood to his full height again. “I can give you one agent’s information. I am rather low on the ladder but he is a higher rung: he is a Keeper. If you find him, you will be able to get more out of him: more agents, more targets for Villanelle to leave a trail for you.”

Eve breathed out. “Thank you, Konstantin.”

“And then you leave my house and you never come back.”

Eve snorted and grabbed one out of dozen slices of hazelnut spread bread.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I hope you enjoyed this update! Don't be shy in telling me what you think :)
> 
> I love you all!


	4. We Both Know We Can Never Change

Kenny had had no issue setting up the one laptop he’d brought: his own that had cost him a small fortune, somewhat akin to a philharmonic musician and their violin but worth so much more in intellectual data. A violin didn’t carry its own tune. He’d brought a fold out chair and some cheap IKEA folding garden table as well as a door lock to where she’d asked him to meet her, just so he could be safe if left alone. Though he guessed Eve would be the same as she had always been, a shadow over his shoulder when he worked late nights. 

A quick text from a burner phone to his phone number that she’d memorized along with every other important number had been enough to lure the young boy, equipment in hand, to the little storage room out on the outskirts of London. When he’d knocked on the metal grated door she’d opened it from the inside and they’d shared a glance and a sniff, eyebrows raised. 

_Excuse the smell._

“I can’t stay long, Eve,” he warned her immediately. “For obvious reasons, and anyway I don’t really want to be here.”

“You came, didn’t you?”

He shrugged, shoulders low as he pushed past her to set up in the small 9x9 room, a single lightbulb illuminating them both. He quickly realized as he booted up his computer that there was only the one chair and he moved in between standing and sitting and standing again, unsure of what to do before Eve waved him into the seat, choosing to stand herself. He glanced over his shoulder at her, prompting her silently. 

“Right then,” Eve sighed. “Konstantin gave me a Keeper’s name.”

His eyes grew wide. “You’ve talked to Konstantin?”

“Am I not allowed?” She crossed her arms. 

“It’s just-“ he paused, hands curled in resolute fists against his thighs. “He left the house, right after you went to Rome with Villanelle. And he didn’t come back. And mum’s not talking about it but I thought he’d just left or whatever after a fight.” He shrugged weakly. “They do that.”

“He’s with his family, Kenny.”

“Oh.” He frowned. “I don’t know if you should be telling me this.”

“Then let’s not talk about it. He gave me a Keeper’s name, Kenny, I need to find out who that is.” She handed him a post-it with the Russian’s familiar scrawl and he quickly began typing, following leads faster than she could comprehend. She took steps back until she hit the storage room’s hard brick wall and watched him work as she rubbed small circles into her bandages. It always amazed her how Hollywood had it wrong, it wasn’t easy work, it wasn’t fast, and it wasn’t green text on black wallpaper. It was blue.

Kenny worked without a mouse, simply tapped away when he was prompted. As they waited for a moment for a particular query to give something he could work with he turned to look at her, swiveling in the chair and back rod straight.

“Is this about Villanelle?”

“Kenny.”

He shook his head and turned back, seemingly satisfied and dissatisfied at the same time. “Isn’t it always? Your man lives in Switzerland. Would you like his address and phone number?”

“I want to know if you can access his contacts,” she replied. “Contacts from the Twelve. Other Keepers, other handlers, anyone seemingly under his thumb but no one above him in the hierarchy.”

“I’ll have to read his messages to discern that,” he said. “That will take time.” 

“We’ve got all night.”

She went on two coffee trips for the two of them. He took his with too much cream for a man his age and she’d almost bought him a hot chocolate instead but it would have been too much of a mockery for him. Villanelle would have understood the joke. 

Or she would have stabbed her for it.

“Do you want this list emailed to you?” he asked at 3 a.m. She watched him over the rim of her cup, two hands holding it tightly. “There’s eight names, scattered around Europe and west Asia. Varying ages, both sexes. Doesn’t seem to be a pattern but then again, random recruits are just that. Random.”

“I have one more favor to ask of you.”

“Please, Eve, I already did what you asked.” It was almost a whine. His hands didn’t move from between his thighs. “It’s getting late, I work in the morning.”

Her eyebrows raised significantly. “What, and I don’t?” 

He looked away. “That’s not what I meant.”

“I’m grateful and all for the little clean-up act you did back in Rome,” she said. “And I’m real grateful you didn’t just leave me there to rot in my own pool of blood, but you owe me for getting me there in the first place.”

“I tried to warn you,” he murmured. “We tried to warn you about her.”

“Easy to blame the psychopath for everything, isn’t it,” she muttered. “Kenny, I just need to know that you can send this list of people a message.”

Kenny blinked. “Is, is that it?”

Eve nodded. “I need you to make it look like the message is from this Keeper that Konstantin gave me.”

“Jesus, Eve,” the boy breathed out. “Mum is going to have my head.”

“You owe me this,” she repeated. “And so does she.” She bent down to be level with him. “Why would she have your head? Because you’re helping me or because she’s part of the Twelve?”

“Please, Eve, I already did what you asked-“

“Kenny,” she warned. “You want this to be over too, right?” He sighed shortly, squirming in his seat. “You’re here for a reason, you read my text message for a reason.” Finally he let out a thunderous sigh.

“What do you want it to say? The message.”

“I need you to put a hit out on Villanelle and make it look like this guy and the Twelve sent it.”

“Not on yourself?” He cleared his throat. “I mean, why?”

“I want this to be over, Kenny.”

He fixed her pointedly, sucking in the inside of his cheeks as it slowly dawned on him. “Eve.” He let his head loll forward, chin against his chest. “How much?”

“What?”

“What do you think Villanelle’s head is worth?”

She chewed on her tongue, fighting back the quick-witted response that burned and seared into the tips of her ears. She’s priceless. “What’s the usual amount on these kinds of things?”

“We valued you at thirty-five thousand pounds,” he replied. “Back then.”

She scoffed. “That’s it?”

“You were a low-level employee, your only redeeming quality on your ransom was that you had some degree of intel on the Twelve’s best assassin.” He shifted under her scrutiny. “Sorry.”

“Put her out at a million.”

He turned abruptly. “What, pounds?”

“Swiss Franks.” She began to pace the space.

“Isn’t that a bit much?” 

“It’s not like we’re paying it,” she laughed off-handedly. 

“And then what?”

“Can you put an RSVP on that? I want to know who takes the bait so that I can keep an eye on the situation.”

“I can give you the tools to keep up on a USB,” he offered. 

She nodded, musing to herself. “They’ll drive her out of whatever shit posh hole she’s hiding in and I’ll find her that way. Follow her trail.”

He began to finish the letter template. “Is that what you call a string of murders?”

“Thank you, Kenny.”

When he finished he had her approve the message, and after a moment where she thought he was praying to himself, he clicked on the enter key and the computer dinged. He reached for an empty USB in his backpack and charged it up with the program he’d promised her. He handed it to her silently and she pocketed it, watching him for a long moment. 

“You know,” he stood straight, towering over her as he closed the lid. “Contrary to popular belief, I don’t enjoy being manipulated.”

She watched him. “I know.”

“I know my mother is,” he sucked his teeth. “Who she is, but she’s not a bad person. What she does has always been for queen and country. For safety. What you do is for yourself.”

“I know.”

“Please don’t contact me again,” he said. He packed quickly, laptop bunkered into his backpack and he motioned with a nod of his head for her to keep the cheap furniture. The metal door came up easily in a flurry of noises and the cold night air hit her hard, making her narrow her eyes against the light breeze. 

She was alone.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I appreciate you all!  
I don't bite <3


	5. Ungnyeo

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> No one:  
Absolutely no one:  
ASMR with Villanelle: You hear that girls? That is the sound of me kissing my knife and that is the sound of me slicing through a body and-

Eve had been raised in a middle-income family, had studied her way into a middle-income university, had been cherished into a middle-income marriage and because of all that middle-income privilege, she’d never realized how terribly awful it was to ride a travel bus for seventeen hours straight. 

Eve wished she had complimentary middle-class peanuts right now.

She felt grimy and sweaty and she had to pee but she’d already peed once and the bathroom had scared her off of peeing for a while.

It was raining in Romania. 

The Twelve agent living in Bucharest had been the first to make a move, a mere 48 hours after he’d received the message she “hadn’t” sent. She hadn’t even had time to get inside the country’s borders that the man had already been found, burned to death in his car, probably mere minutes after he’d located the blonde in the city. The vehicle itself hadn’t been victim of arson, suggesting that whoever had done the deed had transported his body there after his death and it almost surprised Eve.

She’d never taken Villanelle for a girl loving fire. 

Then again, maybe the autopsy would reveal that the blonde had trussed him up and knifed him and strangled him all at the same time before dousing the man in kerosene and lighting him with a union jack zippo, hazel eyes reflecting the orange and red glows. Or maybe she’d maimed him: cut his Achille’s heels and let him fall to the ground, the man crumpling in pain and agony and shock and she’d lit him and listened to his screams and Eve suddenly wondered how long it took for a man to burn to death. 

How long it took for the permeating smell of cooked flesh to finally dissipate. 

Had Villanelle’s mouth watered?

She realized now as the bus pulled into its terminus and as the back of her ankles itched that the alluring blonde could be anywhere. She reached down her pant leg to fix its cuff and to make sure the switchblade she’d hidden inside her boot was still there, snug. 

Villanelle always reveled in her kills; they were natural highs to her and she usually cooled down before moving cities again but had she asked the man why he’d wanted to bring her head, severed from her body, back to Switzerland? On the minute chance she had, had she decided to leave as soon as she’d dumped his charred body? 

She saw Villanelle everywhere, from the station to her hotel on the river but the bad part of the river and she locked the room’s door and closed its curtains before sitting on the bed. She couldn’t make herself undress. 

She searched her computer bag for the USB Kenny had provided her days before and ported it. Two of the eight agents they had contacted had responded negatively; they were adamant that the target was much too volatile to take on. Eve knew then that they had already met the young woman. As she perused the mailbox her laptop started to ding and she watched as several emails came in, rapid fire. The subject lines were either empty or panicked and she clicked on the first one, read through it diagonally and then read the rest.

They’d been alerted to the Romanian’s death. 

Some were asking for a higher ransom, some for collateral damage money if they failed their mission or lost equipment. Had she ever been this scared of Villanelle? She could only pinpoint a dull ache near her heart where she kept herself at bay. If there was fear, it was at her fingertips, around a sharp blade, against a soft pink sweater. 

In a pool of blood. 

Bucharest was a gorgeous city, but was its soil strong enough to hold the essence of Villanelle’s dark soul in its roots? Would it be able to hold her back if she was to wake again? Would its moss be soft enough for Eve to finally rest?

Eve tucked what was left of her hair into a bun and began to reply to the Twelve’s agents. She upped the reward half a million; it seemed enough after a gruesome murder. She wrote nothing else and gave no other information. If her office had had a Kenny these agents most likely did too and they’d probably started searching for Villanelle’s next move and after hitting ‘send’, she pulled up the program the computer whiz had left her.

The Romanian city was easily available and she plugged into its CCTV, searching for the place where the body had been found in tandem with Google maps. The body had been dumped in a car on the Piața Romană, and Eve swallowed vomit back down into her stomach, annoyed and feeling harassed still. Like she hadn’t consented to this, wasn’t consenting. She rewinded the tapes to the body being found by a young couple (and she hoped they weren’t tourists because that was one way to ruin a honeymoon) and paused it to jot the time down. 

Relics and habits of a time bygone. 

She started rewinding once more, watching the footage as the midday sun turned into morning light and then dawn. The streetlights turned on and the streets became quiet and then it was three hours of nothing: cats and dogs and a stray drunk. Eve’s eyebrows perked up as she finally watched a figure come out from a side street. Villanelle was wearing too many layers trying to bulk herself up and she was wearing a black curly haired wig but it was her, carrying a body over her shoulder. Charred. 

The young woman was nonchalant as she broke into the car that would be the man’s first grave and she pushed the corpse in. She took some time fixing him up in the driver’s seat and Eve wanted to bite through the flesh in her cheek as she understood Villanelle was posing the poor man. The hidden blonde reached into her hair and pulled off her sunglasses, gently placing them on the agent’s face. Seemingly satisfied, she closed the car door and dug her hands deep into her pockets and left the square. 

Eve followed her on the CCTV, down random streets that she didn’t take note of, only caring for the girl’s destination. 

The Grand Hotel Continental. 

Eve sighed audibly. Of course Villanelle would never hide out in some ratty place like she was. Of course she would be surrounded in silk sheets and pricey shampoo bottles. Her fingers reached for her new burner phone, bent on calling Kenny or Jess or Hugo but she stalled before throwing the device away as if it were venomous. She fast-forwarded instead in the tapes, checking every angle on every entrance, including the fire exits. Villanelle hadn’t exited the hotel since her kill: she was still there, licking off the blood and the kerosene from between the claws off of one hand, the other buried between her legs. 

Eve hastily pulled her shoes on and then paused. 

She couldn’t possibly rush the woman. 

Could she?

She didn’t know what room she was staying in. She didn’t know if Villanelle knew others were coming for her. Had she bugged the elevator? Did she have a gun on her? A machete? She’d been so easy going about strolling back to the hotel, did she not care because she knew in any case that someone was watching her? Her side suddenly hurt and she pressed at it, dropping her shoe on the carpeted floor. Her head dropped between her knees and she breathed deeply, letting the blood rush to her head. 

Why was it so hard for her to do what she wanted to do? Why did she ask herself that many questions? Did Villanelle even question herself? Had she ever? Eve had barely been pushed to murder a man, why couldn’t she murder a woman?

Was Villanelle even that?

Her computer dinged. 

An email from an agent in Belarus. He apparently knew too that Villanelle had stayed in Bucharest after all and where; he wanted to flush her out. The city’s underbelly of side streets and narrow passageways would be too much of a hassle and the assassin probably knew the city like the back of her hand by now (Eve sometimes wondered if she had a photographic memory). She didn’t know how he could possibly drive her out but she could see the end result now: the young blonde pushed to the countryside, somewhere were century old dilapidated houses were falling apart. She’d be brought to her knees by the man, shot point blank in between the eyes. Corpse left to the carrion crows.

But Eve wanted to be the one holding that gun. 

She began to panic lightly, finding it hard to breathe in the space her lungs could give her. She’d just wanted to find Villanelle with the Twelve’s unsuspecting help and she had and now, what now? She’d thought herself so clever but now as the world closed in around her she was stuck. Lost. Swimming upwards and swimming hard but never breaking the surface. Barely grazing the tension. 

Like in Moscow. Like in Paris. Rome. 

Villanelle had taken everything from her, had filled her vision and swallowed her whole inside a darkness she couldn’t see out of until she tore her belly apart. 

She would have to be a self-made deus ex machina. 

Eve took deep breaths that finally stopped her vision from swaying, let her think.

She would let the Belarussian come and she would keep an eye on them both, let him wash her out of the city. Follow her. She needed somewhere quiet and safe to end her first life. But she had to find a way to keep the blonde alive long enough to have her to herself. She couldn’t possibly message the man; she probably didn’t sound anything like the Swiss counterpart he thought the orders came from and what would she tell him anyway? She’d let him play dog to the girl’s fox and she’d be the hunter with the leash and the whistle to call him back and when the fox was cornered, 

She’d kill the dog. 

The fox was hers to skin alive.

She used her computer’s search engine and found the phone number she was looking for and dialed it. It rang.

“Hello, do you speak- oh you do? Perfect,” she said. “I’d like to arrange a beginner’s lesson at your range, with a sniper rifle.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Next chapter, a reunion


	6. Goodbye, old Paint

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Fun fact about this story: I get nightmares more often than I'd like and some of these past and upcoming gore themed thoughts and scenes are based on those.  
Also, how Eve eats that croissant in chapter 2? I eat my croissants like that. A heathen, I know.

Three hundred feet away, Villanelle was staring down at the murdered body of the Belarussian agent. 

Eve would have sworn she could see the signature flaming green hazel eyes from where she stood, rifle in hand. 

The range’s master marksman, after several hours of practice spread out over two weeks, hadn’t been very impressed with her. She’d improved of course, anyone with her initial level would have, but as he’d scratched his beard and watched her put down the rifle after her last lesson (he’d reminded her of Konstantin then), she knew her prospects weren’t great. Her ears had rung with frustration and he’d joked about her being good for an African elephant hunt and she’d laughed lightly but the taste in the back of her mouth had been bitter. 

She’d shook when she’d first been handed the gun; its weight in her hands so much heavier than she’d ever expected it to be. Her first shot had been just as shaky and the recoil had hit her hard in the shoulder. He’d commented on her stance, her grip, the certain fear she exuded when her finger flexed the trigger down. It got easier after that. 

So she hadn’t expected to _actually_ shoot the man threatening Villanelle point blank in the head. He'd found the assassin for him and she didn't need him anymore. She’d expected to miss, scare him off of Villanelle’s scent and into her open arms at the border where she could actually hope to aim true or knife him to the brink of death, letting the elements take care of the rest but she’d taken aim at the building parallel to hers, three hundred feet away and seven floors up in the air, and pulled the trigger. 

She’d wanted nothing else _but_ to miss. 

In her reticle he’d collapsed on himself like colliding stars would: his head had swallowed in on itself and his brain had ejected out of his cranium by every orifice it could, new and original, splattering blood and gray matter on all four walls. All over the blonde in front of him. 

He hadn’t even crumpled to the ground that Villanelle was already bending down out of view to probably poke at him. Eve threw the safety on the rifle before throwing it into the corner with her duffel bag. Her shoulder was bruised and her hands were still shaking but she was running out of the commercial building’s service room and to the fire exit stairs. Villanelle would be running by now and she would be too. 

She hadn’t expected this to be their reunion. 

The seven flights of stairs were wreaking havoc on her knees, her lungs, and her side was screaming at her to take a moment to breathe and God why didn’t she take the fucking elevator? Villanelle had probably taken the elevator. She probably wasn’t sweating up a storm down the back of her designer shirt. God she wished she was twenty again. She burst out onto the Czech streets of Ostrava, a cramp in her side and the duffel bag on her back seemingly gaining weight with every step. She suddenly missed her desk job and she wondered why she’d ever wanted to be out in the field. 

Those green eyes flashed in her mind. 

Villanelle had let herself be tracked over the Romanian border into the Czech Republic and then she’d shopped, she’d ate. A lot. Eve knew then that the assassin hadn’t known she was the mastermind behind the first of the hits. She seemed to be living the arson rather well. Eve hadn’t expected any less of her. That her defenses were down meant she truly didn’t think any danger was beyond her level of expertise; that she honestly thought of Eve as nothing more than a ghost. Eve didn’t know if she should be offended that Villanelle had so quickly forgotten about her, or relieved. 

She stood in the street, breathless and huffing, she waited for the blonde to find her way down to her hotel’s lobby. Waited for her to cross its doors and see her and she reached up to pull her hood up over her baseball cap suddenly, consciously. She tucked her shirt down, glancing at her chest worse than she would have the rest of her. She didn’t pause to wonder why.

But no one came. 

She figured she looked suspicious, there in the middle of a dead street in the early morning sun with her hood up after a noise that was too obviously a gunshot had rang out. And she checked her watch but still Villanelle didn’t come and she began to panic that maybe the girl had found a back or side door. She breathed easier remembering that she’d checked that those types of doors lead nowhere but to this road that she stood on. It was another ten minutes before Eve stormed into the building herself.

The hotel was expensive, as if Villanelle couldn’t stomach the idea of ever staying in anything remotely resembling a five-star establishment and Eve had to fight back her anger, swallow it down, as she took the elevator up to the seventh. She hadn’t stopped to ask where Villanelle stayed; if she had they would probably have taken her for some kind of homeless nut. From where she’d shot she knew which end of the building the assassin’s room was, which side. There was only a handful of doors to pick from now and she walked to the farther end. The wood was cool when she pressed her ear to it, the smell of gunpowder evident as it puffed out in smokes from underneath the doorway, pushed by the wind coming in from the window she’d broken when she’d broken the man’s skull. 

It opened when she prodded it with a shoulder, peering in cautiously. 

The man’s corpse was across the room, laying in already congealing blood and broken glass shards. His head was torn half off, lower mandibule still attached but everything above it gone and his flesh pierced by the window in a million pieces beneath him. It was grotesque but she didn’t feel as if it was; _I did that_. She breathed out. There was Villanelle, kneeling at the man’s side, almost petting him. Had she been doing that this entire time? The blonde turned when the woman’s shoe cracked against some glass. A slow, tortuous movement. 

“Eve Polastri.”

Eve paused, suddenly sick to her stomach as her brain pieced the voice and the tone and intonation together in her mind. Villanelle, her green eyes and her pupils dilated wide as she stared Eve down, wearing what could only be the sheerest of dress shirts over a pair of black leather pants,

was mimicking Aaron Peel. 

The same breath between the words, the same idea behind them of a question and final realization and finally, resolution. Dawning. Admiration. Villanelle smiled an empty smile and stood to her full height. “Is this your idea of fun since our last date, then? Sending out armed men after me?”

Eve sucked in her cheeks. She was almost surprised that her voice was as rough as it was. “That’s the agents’ prerogatives, not mine.”

The girl paced around the man, being careful that her already red bottomed heels didn’t step into the blood and she sat at the dresser. She’d been staying in this room a while: she’d laid her things out in an order specific to her. Her eyes met Eve’s in the mirror as she reached for her mascara. “A million Swiss Francs, Eve? I am flattered,” she purred. Had the man knocked on her door while she’d been getting ready?

“It’s a million and a half, now,” Eve said. “And I thought you might be.”

“I do not like the wanting me to die part.”

“I hadn’t either.”

Villanelle’s signature pout drew her eyelids downwards. “Still angry about that?” She finished her eyelashes before circling around to watch Eve, predator and prey, even though she was still smiling. “You look good.” She leaned forward, elbows hard on her knees, covered in someone else’s organs. She tilted her head, chin resting on a fist. “Especially since I left you for dead.”

“I remember,” Eve replied testily. “Get up. Let’s go.”

Villanelle smiled wolfishly, and the Korean woman could have sworn that if she were that animal she would have been licking her jowls rid of blood and meat and saliva. “I am afraid I cannot go,” green eyes darted over Eve’s figure hungrily. Somewhere, the wolf howled. “_anywhere_ with you.”

Eve steeled herself. “You can, and you will. We're going to finish this once and for all.”

An eyebrow raised, Villanelle motioned to the corpse with her chin. “Or, you will shoot me?” The girl watched her for a moment, features going through a series of emotions Eve couldn’t quite pinpoint until she settled on a rictus bordering comedic stubbornness. “No. I do not think I will. I have my own places to be, now that you have ruined my room and that I know you have sent others after me and because you mean nothing to me. Bavaria must be nice.” She shrugged lightly, settling farther in her chair as Eve sweltered in anger and anxiety and just pure, raw feeling. The woman reached for her rifle. 

Villanelle didn’t flinch. 

Eve aimed loosely. “You’re coming with me.”

“Oh?” The blonde’s eyes were wide, mocking her as she looked around. “Where to?” She waggled her finger at the Korean woman. “Do you have a broom around here somewhere?”

Eve gaped. “I just, I just saved your fucking life-“

“You are the one who sent this man after me, Eve, and anyway I think you were aiming for me-“

“And you _insult_ me? No, fuck you!”

Villanelle suddenly stood taller, taller than Eve could have ever remembered her to be and she felt like the monster that was the girl’s soul had come out from her shadow and was towering like a vulture over her. “Eve.”

The woman stilled. 

“Get out of my way.” Villanelle raised a shoulder before dropping it again. “I have decided on Bavaria.”

Eve’s voice wouldn’t come out and she swallowed thickly before trying again, rifle wavering slightly. “But I found you.”

The monster tapered above her as Villanelle spoke softly. “You did. Get out of my way.” She leaned in, whispering as if she were telling a secret above the police sirens in the distance growing closer rapidly. “We know you could never finish what you set out to start, anyway.” She shouldered past the woman roughly then and Eve turned to follow her with the weight of her. 

“Don’t,” she warned. 

“Think of it as fun _stuff_, Eve,” Villanelle called back. She began throwing the clothes in her closet into a backpack, open at her feet. “You trying to find me, it gives you purpose, yes? Gives you something to do. You know, since there is nothing left but me.” Eve followed her into the bathroom where she continued to pack her essentials. “You have lost my interest, you are boring me, and this blood is drying and I need a shower, so,” They both glanced out the window; the police sirens blared and the car lights glowed every other moment. “I must be going now. You left quite the mess,” she whistled. She zipped the small bag containing her plethora of shampoos before crossing back into the main room, dropping it into the backpack. Eve followed her again, staying a hair’s breath away. 

Villanelle threw her a look but seemed relaxed at her closeness, leaning into her too. “I would not follow me if I were you, Eve,” she suggested softly. She placed her fists on her hips and looked around the room, checking. Villanelle turned to face Eve fully and Eve thought it was shock then that registered in the blonde’s eyes.

But she didn’t take the time to ponder over the hazel greens as she pulled out the nurse’s bandage scissors from Villanelle’s side with a sickening lurch of sounds and liquids pouring out immediately on the floor. 

Villanelle’s backhand was strong and Eve felt her teeth ring inside her skull, like a ricocheting bullet, when she hit the floor head first. The blonde spat out something in Russian that didn’t sound too Christian to Eve and she used the wall for support as she held her side. 

“Again, Eve? The same fucking place?” She was yelling now, features twisted in something far from angelic. “Scissors?!”

“They hide well in the elbow,” Eve coughed. Her face felt like it was on fire and she palmed at her cheek, finding it wet. “It’s a card trick.”

Villanelle’s knees buckled lightly and she hovered over Eve, necklace dangling in between them, her own hand slowly turning red. “I am going to kill you,” she hissed. “You and every card player in the world.”

Eve laughed, the rush of adrenaline making her head swim fast and she laid it back down on the tiles, hair a mess around her. “It’s not even that deep.” Villanelle’s eyebrows drew again in incomprehensible, fleeting emotions before settling on one face. She pawed lightly at her side, factoring in that Eve was right when she glanced across the room. The scissor’s blades were barely half an inch long. 

“The great assassin, _Villanelle_!” Eve said. “Whining about safety scissors.” The blonde reached down with her free hand and grabbed her by her hair, pulling her up harshly to be inches from her.

Villanelle was almost growling. “I could kill you with these.”

Eve wrapped her own arm around Villanelle’s neck, hoisting herself closer. Villanelle licked her lips and Eve could have sworn she felt her tongue lapping at her and black eyes gazed into a hazel green gaze. “You could, but would it give you purpose to? You know, since there’s nothing left but me.”

“You presume too much, Eve,” Villanelle warned, whispering now. “I left you; back in Rome.”

Eve’s fingers fell down the girl’s side, sliding beneath her shirt and resting her hand on Villanelle’s fingers. “Did you?”

Villanelle’s jaw worked on itself and Eve let her bleed freely down onto her shirt as their breaths mingled. Eve could have sworn she could hear the other woman’s heart thud in her ears over the police sirens, over her own blood rushing in her veins. She began to lean up, Villanelle gazing down at her mouth. 

The assassin unceremoniously dropped the ex-agent and Eve let out a rasp when she bounced on the floor, watching upside down as the girl reached for her bags and left without looking back. 

Eve reached her hand out to the door, fingers closing on air.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Did you guys like this reunion??
> 
> I know I keep to myself and don't post personal notes on here too much but maybe I should try; I really would love to read what you lot think of this so far! 
> 
> I appreciate every one of you! Be good, be safe!


	7. Had your Eyes Wide Open

In Ostrava, when Eve had finally been able to sit up, head ringing and eyes swimming in unshed tears of frustration and pain, she’d stepped over the corpse by the window and looked out into the parking lot below. Focusing as best as she could. The time it had taken her to make her way to the open air had been enough for Villanelle to make her way to a dirt bike she’d apparently purchased and left there and Eve took a moment to be marveled at the girl able to drive one of those. It was red and black and yellow and the assassin threw her leg over to straddle it easily. 

And Eve let her ride away. 

Jealous that Villanelle knew how to ride motorcycles. 

Knowing full well that the bike meant Villanelle wouldn’t be using traditional roads again. Knowing CCTV would be useless. She wondered if Konstantin would be ashamed or proud she’d even tried stepping out of her comfort zone. She’d leaped, really. And she’d fallen.

Fucking hard.

And the ground was cold and unforgiving. 

She felt a weight in her belly and nothing in her heart. She pushed at the body at her feet with the tip of her boot, nudging it harder and harder until she was rightfully kicking it, splattering blood and brains over the floor and over the bottom of her pant legs. Outside, the dirt bike roared away and the police car doors slammed shut. Shuffling feet and harried voices in a language she didn’t understand finally pulled her out of her reverie and panic began to rise in between her lungs. She was covered in blood. She’d traipsed all over the crime scene. The rifle was literally still on the ground inches away. 

Eve sat down next to the corpse.

And began to cry.

Fat, watery tears that mixed itself with the grime on her cheeks to land on her jeans as she made as much noise as she could. It didn’t take long for the police to find her; Villanelle had left the door open and Eve’s voice echoed down the long hallways. 

A pair of strong hands attached hers behind her back with handcuffs, pulling her to her feet and she continued to cry all the way to the station, small streams that were entirely her and not an act anymore as she was placed in a room alone, in a chair against a metal table. She cried for herself until someone came to find her. For her maiden name, for a comfortable sleep in a London semi-detached, for her kindness on the run since Villanelle first killed. 

“English, yes?”

Eve looked up, eyes red and swollen but dry and she nodded. The man sat down heavily, the gun holstered in his belt not escaping her gaze and he sighed as he placed a manila folder between the two of them. 

“Me,” he paused and she knew then their conversation would be a lot of those. “Detective. Jakub Jahoda, Ostrava _policie_.” He looked at her expectedly as he fished a pen out of his button down pocket, clicking it once before reaching for a piece of paper from inside the folder, blank.

“Eve,” she began. “Eve Baek. Uh, Baek Min-Ji.” He glanced at her, obviously unsure as he began to write and she held her hand out. He offered her the pen gratefully. Blood printed the sheet, transferred from her hands as she spelled it out in capital letters. She thought of adding her birth date but she suddenly felt ashamed of her age. She could still smell Villanelle on her. 

“What happened, Eve?”

The detective’s voice was soft, almost caring, and she felt bile in the back of her throat rising to meet her back teeth. 

“I was, uh, hired, by this man.” 

His eyebrows furled. “Hired. Why? Hired for what?”

“No, nothing like that,” Eve said quickly. She wanted to laugh at the idea he’d conjured. “Just a personal massage. He was in town for, business.” The detective was writing in Czech under her name, tongue almost poking out. “He was standing at the window when I came in and we talked and then the window _shattered_ and-“ Eve broke off for effect, breathing in tightly. She wished now she had been in the room like Villanelle had been, to watch the Belarussian cave in on himself. “His face just, exploded.”

“Exploded?”

She looked at the man, a boy, really, and nodded. “Yes, like, uh, he was shot, I mean. In the head.”

He checked his notes. “Third person in room, more blood. Was someone else with you?”

The police department worked hard, it seemed. “The, the killer. She came in. I tried to help the man but he was already dead and she burst in and threatened me. She had that rifle you found.”

“A woman?” he said. He raised his eyebrows but said nothing else. The same look Carolyn had given her the first time they’d met cloned onto his face. 

She continued. “She’s-“

This seemed familiar.

“She’s tall, blonde. Physically fit.” She placed her head in her hands. Any other descriptor swirled in her mind and she felt jealousy and greed keeping her from saying more. “I’m so sorry, I can’t tell you anymore there was so much blood and it was so scary and I’m so tired-“

The detective placed a hand on hers, pulling it away to look into her eyes. “It is okay.”

“Is it?” she murmured. “I, I stabbed her, detective.”

“Stabbed?”

Eve lungs hurt and her shoulders fell. “With some small scissors.”

“She is hurt, this woman?”

“I don’t think she can be hurt,” she said. 

“Excuse me?”

“It was small scissors.” Eve shrugged lightly, awkwardly. “It wouldn’t stop her, I think, of all things.”

They let her go with a promise to return in the morning and an armed security officer; a half cry to witness protection. He, in his language, tried to stop her but she treated him to an early dinner at a restaurant nearby to the police precinct, off of Sokolstà street, a short walk from the building. The speaking barrier unnerved her and she watched him eat daintily, watching her back. She thought of Hugo then, of sleeping with this man. This boy.

They took dessert on the go; she was staying yet another block away at the Hotel Villa but instead of veering into its lobby she bypassed it. The park by the river, though it was a bit chilly, was just right she felt for her to finish an ice cream in. She sat at a bench and wondered if ducks liked little nuts, chopped up and caramelized but she ate them herself and the guard stood close by but didn’t sit with her. When night fell the streetlamps turned on, illuminating everything in a hazy warm glow she didn’t quite feel entitled to and she sighed as she shivered. 

Her officer was getting antsy and she finally stood, nodding to him when he raised his eyebrows in question.

Her room was comfortable and the arrangement suddenly reminded her of years ago when she’d been working for MI5, eating curry take out much too often and falling asleep way too late chasing the feeling of satisfaction. She never caught it. 

She offered her shadow a chair in the room and he sat down in it gingerly, looking away when she went to the bathroom. Maybe he thought she’d shower but instead she just scrubbed at her fingernails, too tired to get out of her clothes. She applied a new layer of deodorant from the small bag offered to her by the police station and used the toilet before sitting down on her bed, watching him. 

“What’s your name?”

He met her eyes, puzzled. 

She pointed at herself, sighing shortly as she thought of Tarzan and Jane. Glamorous, he in his leopard leotard. “Eve.”

He brightened understandingly. “Jan.”

She took the name and spun it around in her head before falling back on the mattress, gazing up at the ceiling. “You don’t know how fucked I am, Jan.” She didn’t wait for an answer, knowing he didn’t understand her anyway. “I’m so, so fucked.” She turned her head sideways to look at him. “Do you think she’s done ignoring me now? Fuck, she probably forgot to even think of me. I’ve been thinking about her a lot. Maybe I went too far, maybe I went from cute and pathetic to a pain in the ass. A buzzing fly that she’d rather swat than deal with.” She frowned. “But she didn’t kill me.” Upside down, she gazed at Jan. “Why didn’t she kill me?” 

He gave her a small, encouraging smile, and she gave it back. Sitting up, she took her socks off and threw them to the bottom of the bed before patting the comforter beneath her, next to her hip. “Come on, you can’t spend all night on that chair.” She insisted when Jan started to protest, standing up to drag him to her side. They shared another uneasy smile and he placed his hands in his lap, glancing sideways at her. She leaned into him and his gaze lowered to her lips. 

Eve had killed just that morning and she could still hear the gun firing off, feel the pain in her shoulder, but she hadn’t felt anything then. Everything had been muted by Villanelle. But now, straddling the young man and squeezing his throat in between her dirtied hands, she felt different. He struggled and she tightened and placed her thumbs just right, ready to hear the crack that would come with breaking his vertebrae once she went through with it but she felt different. 

Through the zoom on the rifle she’d seen limbs and blood but the officer beneath her looked nothing alike as his eyes bulged and the whites became yellow and veined. He stared at her, pleading, his grip on her forearms starting to lose their grasp and she faltered. 

“I’m sorry, Jan,” she whispered. She reached a hand over to the nightstand, keeping him down with her other, and slammed into his temple with the bottom of a lamp. 

He slumped beneath her and she breathed. “Do they always stare?” she asked the room. Villanelle had stared when she’d pushed the knife through her abdomen but it hadn’t been fear in her hazel gaze. Eve didn’t want to know what it had been. She checked Jan’s pulse and found it steady and she sighed inwardly, scrambling off of him. He was heavy and she struggled to displace him on the bed before untying his shoes and shoving him beneath the sheets, tucked in on his side. 

She had his gun, she had his car keys. 

Bavaria might be nice.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> OH hewwo, thank you for reading! Please let me know what you thought!!
> 
> Next chapter: Run, Eve, run! Villanelle's right behind you! Oh god she can't hear us she's got airpods in!


	8. She May Contain the Urge to Run Away

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This work is actually turning out to be a lot longer than I thought it would be, I'm having a lot of fun with expanding the plot and I hope you're all enjoying it as much as I am!

“That was cute, giving my description to the _policie_?”

Eve took the time to finish her sandwich, watching the birds outside her window with narrowed eyes as she thoughtfully licked the Nutella off of her fingers. When she turned, she let the countertop dig into her hands resting at the small of her back. Villanelle watched her like a hawk, every movement, every twitch, her own lips quivering between the starts of smiles and the ends of signature sneers. 

Eve had heard her come in through the front door; she’d left it unlocked. Villanelle would have found her way in anyway. At one point. Whenever she had decided to finally crawl out from between bodies, alive or dead. Eve’d almost expected her to climb her way through the kitchen window as she ate, limbs over limbs and hair trailing across jagged glass to hover above her, teeth bared around the blade of a curved knife. 

Villanelle, backpack slung over her shoulder, looked horribly plain. Plainer than what Eve thought she could ever actually manage without burning from the inside out. A demon in a holy place. Her body betrayed her; her loose bun and the circles under her eyes, the old and fading makeup. She’d squeezed herself into a cheap sweater jacket and a pair of black leggings. Only the energy behind her eyes was a lit furnace, forever burning. 

Eve reached for the Nutella and a spoon left by the sink, yet again taking the time to dip the utensil in and scoop it back into her mouth. She pointed with it as she swallowed. “You look like shit,” she finally said. 

“It is because I raided your closet,” Villanelle snapped back. 

“Are you pouting?” Eve smiled, a genuine smile that reached her eyes and Villanelle watched her carefully, fingers itching into a fist and back. “Oh my god, you’re pouting.” 

The corners of the girl’s lips quirked. “I have no patience for you today, Eve.”

“Yeah,” Eve said. “Okay.”

“I am here to kill you.”

Eve raised her shoulders and let them drop again as she took another spoonful. 

Villanelle stepped forward threateningly. “I am going to kill you.”

“Do you want a shower first?”

The girl blinked, arched spine swallowing into itself as she rested on a wall, suddenly tired and so _young_. She closed her eyes and finally nodded. The backpack slid to the floor and Eve thought Villanelle would follow it down but she didn’t, instead taking Eve’s nod towards the stairs as confirmation to go. 

Eve waited the better part of an hour in her small apartment’s kitchen, hearing the pipes filtering water to the assassin a floor above and wondering if she had really heard a soft voice singing, warbling. When Villanelle came down, she looked exhausted yet rested and Eve couldn’t help noticing the light trail of water the girl left behind her, wet hair thrown back over her shoulder. She still looked so plain in her clothes and Eve stared. 

“I thought you would flush the toilet,” Villanelle said. “Just to annoy me. What the fuck did you do to your hair?”

“I cut it.”

Villanelle suppressed a whine and sat down heavily at the kitchen table and Eve mirrored her in a chair opposite her. “I really am starting to hate that you have sent these men after me.” Her nails tapped on the table. “I was cozy, eating schnitzel with brown gravy in a cottage in a mountain and I had an appfelstrüdel waiting for dessert and suddenly,” she mimicked an explosion with her hands and her mouth. “A group of seven people were trying to kill me. _And_-“ she fixed Eve with her hazel stare. “You did not even follow me to Bavaria. Instead you are here, in its ersatz.”

“Alsace has its own culture,” Eve said. “And I thought it was a trap.”

“It could have been a vacation,” Villanelle protested. “I am not a monster; I would have waited until the end of your stay to kill you.”

“You can’t kill me.”

“Oh,” Villanelle laughed, eyes wide. “And you can kill me?”

“I’ve been trying.”

“It is not very personal,” the girl said. “Giving someone else your dirty work. And you know what they say, never send a man to do a woman’s job.” She stretched her arms out. “I am still here.”

Eve shifted in her seat. “How did you find me?”

“Same as you did me, Eve.”

It struck Eve now that she had never thought of Villanelle as anything _but_ a killer, that it had never occurred to her that her intelligence also veered into the tech department. She breathed out, voice soft. “I thought you didn’t care about me anymore.” She shook her head, curls bouncing. “Is that crazy?”

Villanelle watched her curiously.

“In Ostrava, you weren’t expecting me and you left me there. I thought that, that maybe Rome had been your last, final straw with me. That finally, you had become yourself again and I had lost your attention.” Eve bit her lower lip, looking out the window with narrowed eyes. “Like they said you would.”

“Who said?” Villanelle asked bitterly. “Other psychopaths? Or their therapists? Have you been seeing one, Eve? Maybe you should. That is two men you have killed now, and one you assaulted. Maybe you hate men? Maybe you have depression.” She stood and began stalking around the woman. “Maybe it is anxiety. Maybe you are insane, schizophrenic? Narcissistic? Do you have any deep-rooted trauma from your childhood that perhaps started the obsessional personality you have today? Maybe you are lonely. Maybe your father used to beat you and you found the same man to marry as the man who raised you and you punish yourself with every relationship you make. Maybe you have a parasite eating away at the grey matter floating around in your skull.”

“Stop,” Eve said. “I get it.”

“Or maybe it is not that deep,” Villanelle continued, hissing now. “Maybe you just like me.”

“I made a pact with myself,” Eve murmured. “I will kill you. You murdered Bill, stalked me, pushed yourself between my husband and I until we were no more. You threatened my friends, dragged me across Europe just to make me feel _fucking_ insane as I went after your shadow. You made me _kill_ a man. You made me turn my back on everything I had ever known because you thought I was bored and you know what, even if I was, even if I was bored with my life and I hated it deep inside of me, it doesn’t excuse anything you’ve ever done to me. I felt bad for stabbing you, in Paris, but now I wish I had kept going. I wouldn’t be here, on my last euros, in a city I don’t know, with you yet again taunting me in a kitchen. And you know what? I never liked Frank but you didn’t have to murder him either.”

“Or maybe,” Villanelle reached down to lift Eve’s chin with her fingers. “You just want to kill me.” She searched her eyes. “There does not always need to be a reason.” She leaned down, pressing her cheek to the top of Eve’s head and Eve allowed herself to breathe out harshly, resting her face against Villanelle’s ugly jacket. She felt the girl’s fingers in her hair, flowing gently. “I know where this ends, Eve. And you do too. For that, I could never forget you. I can try, I can ignore you, walk away from you, but never forget you.” She grimaced and patted Eve’s hair almost thoughtfully. “It offends me that you think I would.”

Eve pulled away sharply. “What, like neither of us can die while the other lives? That type of bullshit? And excuse me but your behavior in Ostrava was nothing like I’d imagined it to be.”

“You imagined our reunion?”

“What, like you didn’t?”

They stared each other down, Villanelle breathing through her nose sharply and Eve could tell she had or was recovering from a cold as air whistled past her nostrils. 

The girl paced lightly. “After I shot you, in Rome, I do not know what I was feeling. I liked shooting you. You hurt me, after all,” she said simply. “I did not think about you then, or after, but I never forgot you.” She rounded the woman, all hints of charm and wit suddenly gone, replaced by the true underbelly of her beast, as if Eve had slowly peeled away her layers until she was finally flayed, blood and muscles and sinew staring back at her. “Because something clawed at me, from deep in my belly.” Her hand traced an outline over her jacket. 

Eve swallowed thickly. 

“You were clawing your way through my liver, my kidney, every single one of my veins. And I tried to swallow you down. For so long. I drank, I ate, I shopped, I fucked.” She ignored Eve’s sudden sharp gaze. “The only time I ever felt something was when I was with you. That was not a lie.”

“I can only have your attention for so long,” Eve recited weakly. Pleadingly. Pathetically. 

Villanelle speared her with her eyes. “You always have my attention.”

“You didn’t come to find me, after.”

“I had no one left on my side, Eve, I had to run. I feel something when I am with you, but I need to be alive to feel anything at all. And I was angry with you.”

“And now?”

Villanelle shrugged flippantly. “I am still angry. And I still want to kill you.” 

Eve sighed, dreamlike. “I still want to kill you, too.”

The blonde smiled then, seemingly satisfied, and she moved to be flush with Eve, pulling her up to her feet. She tugged the jacket open and aside and her tank top followed. Eve glanced down at where her knife had driven in deep, forever ago. Where she had reopened the wound a month back. God, a month already. 

But the cut was still open and it puzzled Eve as it oozed blood around a clean etched layer of skin, as if the girl had cauterized its edges. 

“I opened it again after you did with those scissors, I did not let it heal,” Villanelle murmured in her hair. She played with a curl. “I keep it open, I keep it hurting. I take care of it, nurture it. I want there to be an Eve shaped hole in my body and in my mind. I want to remember how much I want to kill you with my bare hands every time I look at myself.” 

“That’s a lot of hate,” Eve whispered back.

Villanelle’s teeth bared below a smile and she growled, nipping at the woman’s ear with an open mouth. “I hate you a lot.” She paused. “You know, I do not like that you cut your hair, but it is still very nice.”

Eve turned in the assassin’s arms, black eyes as hard as Villanelle’s hazel ones. “How did you do it?”

The blonde raised an eyebrow, careless. “Do what?”

The older woman’s gaze ran down the girl’s body and Villanelle followed her eyes. 

“Ah.” She shrugged. “A paperclip.”

“You did that, with a paperclip?”

Villanelle smirked. “I hate you a _lot_ lot.” 

The Asian woman let her hand fall down the fabric of Villanelle’s top, parting it at the zipper, tugging it down with the weight of her fingers.

“I will kill you,” Eve said.

“You will try.”

“No. I will.” Eve tugged again. 

“Don’t, Eve.” There was a flash of warning in the girl’s green eyes, a flash of hazel and madness and lust and sudden innocence mixed with submission and utter trust. She was surprised but didn’t push her away and the woman didn’t care to unpack any of those emotions, heading further still until she met the barrier of her trousers. Villanelle breathed out, as if disappointed in herself, even if she couldn’t possibly be. “I do not feel like it,” she whispered, pouting comically. 

“I don’t care,” Eve growled.

A wicked grin overtook Villanelle. “I did not take you for one into this sort of thing, darling Eve,” she gloated.

“What does it matter to you?” the other woman replied. She continued downwards. 

“And here I thought this would be-“

Villanelle’s eyes screwed shut as she howled in pain, in shock that resembled real shock as she felt Eve slither her hand around her knife wound, reopened by the woman in front of her days before, in another city, in another country. 

Eve twisted the hot, burning flesh, pinched at it until Villanelle was practically standing on the tip of her toes, gritting her teeth in pain but her green eyes now staring straight ahead at the wall, a furious harpy as she balled her fists at her side. 

The cut widened, a black clotted mess spilling down their pant legs and Villanelle gasped out, collarbone turning red and color running up to her temples as she gazed down her nose at Eve, spurring her on. Eve took the bait eagerly and shamelessly, twisting her fingers into the wound, her index first knuckle deep and the rest splayed against the girl’s abdomen now shaking with pain. But Villanelle said nothing else, made no other noise. She just took it. 

Bloodied from fingertip to wrist, Eve pulled her hand away with a disgusting squelching noise that imbedded itself straightaway into memory. “I want you to remember this image.” Villanelle swallowed thickly, something in her eyes that Eve couldn’t quite decipher, trembling with rage and hate and admiration and pain. She continued. “I want you to remember the image of your blood all over my hands.”

“Pervert,” Villanelle breathed. 

Eve slapped her wound and the blonde’s eyes slammed shut as she breathed in sharply, smiling despite herself as she tilted her head and took in the hit in stride. It was a cold and calculated shift.

“You have ten seconds to leave this apartment, Eve.” Villanelle breathed out. “Then I will come after you.”

Eve ran.


	9. But Hold Her Down with Soggy Clothes and Breezeblocks

The afternoon sunlight hit her hard and Eve narrowed her eyes suddenly, fighting the tears and the itch that ran around her nose. She had slammed the apartment building’s door behind her, hoping but knowing it wouldn’t pause the assassin after her at all, and she began to run as fast as she could in her flat shoes. She took a corner and barreled into a larger avenue, a bicycle flirting by her and she sidestepped dangerously, glancing back behind her in the moment she found. 

There was Villanelle, barely three hundred feet away. Eve could see her in the rifle’s reticle again. 

No one cared that she was running, seemingly and actually for her life. She’d been in Strasbourg long enough now to know it was common for students to run to catch a tram and she let the people she ran past believe what they wanted to believe. The station was practically full with the rush hour boom and she pushed past the throng, ignoring the remarks thrown at her in French, some ruder than others, right into the nearest tram. She didn’t care where it went as long as it took her farther away from Villanelle faster than either their feet would.

Its doors closed and Villanelle crashed into the door, both hands coming up to slam on the tram, separated from Eve by inches of glass. They watched each other, Villanelle’s eyes fury incarnate, and the tram began to drive away, rumbling out of the station. Eve turned, falling against the column between the cars and let out a heavy sigh. Her lungs burned, her wound ached and she shied away from the looks the other riders were giving her. She put her head in her hands, breathing heavily. 

People murmured around her, louder and louder and annoyed she looked up and glanced sideways and she _yelped_, scrambling backwards. 

Villanelle was across the glass from her, sweat pearling on her forehead as she biked at the tram’s speed furiously, powerful thighs almost threatening to split through her leggings. Eve began to panic and she stuttered in place, the next tram station coming dangerously close and knowing that if Villanelle caught her, it would be with a knife in between two of her ribs. She began to run to the other end of the tram, hoping Villanelle would outshoot her but knowing it was futile and she wondered suddenly where the girl had gotten the bike. She imagined her cold-clocking a young man and stealing it from him. 

The tram began to slow down and Eve’s breath stuck in her throat, heart hammering in her chest and she pressed the door’s button repeatedly.

A girl muttered behind her to a friend. “Meuf, la porte ne s’ouvra pas plus vite.” Her friend snickered. 

Finally the door haltered open, catching on itself and Eve squeezed past it and a woman waiting to board, ignoring her protests as she pushed past and began to run again. She crossed the tracks, thought about jumping off the bridge they were on and into the water of the Ill below but she began to backtrack instead, sprinting. She ran across the road and glanced back long enough to watch Villanelle skid to a stop as cars veered past her, caught by the green light. She continued past the municipal baths, heard the bell of a bicycle crash and die on the pavement and knew Villanelle had ditched the bike to come after her on foot. The girl had an advantage: she was wearing sneakers. Ugly ones, but she was. 

Eve skidded around a corner into a narrowed street off of the old university campus, hoping the urbanization of the city would lose her counterpart but realizing soon enough as her vision started to blur around the edges that these barely used streets were perfect for Villanelle to murder her in; leaving just her body and no witnesses. 

Steps pounded behind her and she willed her thighs to give her one last cry of hurrah, another fork in the small backroads arriving at the next corner-

She yelped when she went down, legs giving out from underneath her when Villanelle tackled her down against the paved street. Landing with a sound she didn’t even know could come out of her, the blonde fell on top, effectively crushing her beneath her body. Villanelle scrambled to her feet but Eve couldn’t even fathom trying to follow her into trying again, reaching a crowded street. Not that the assassin would care if she had an audience. She might relish in it. Eve might as well.

“Fuck-_ow_!” Eve was dragged from the ground up onto her knees by her hair and she scrambled to claw at Villanelle’s forearms. She could feel skin peeling away under her nails, blood pockets welling under them and gushing over. Villanelle made no sound, just kept tugging until Eve thought the roots of her hair would give out and until she was on her feet. 

Villanelle threw her against the nearest wall and Eve was convinced the plaster cracked behind her from the force, her head swimming as the blonde pushed her body into her, keeping her still. The girl felt like a prison made of flesh, tendrils of rage and shadows keeping her down and out. 

Villanelle’s growl came from deep within her gut, her chest heaving. “There is less to grab now,” she tugged on Eve’s hair again, eyes flashing as Eve cried out. “But there is still enough.”

“Just do it,” Eve panted. “Just fucking kill me.” Villanelle’s fingers slithered up to tighten around her throat. The blonde leaned in, teeth glinting in the sunlight as she nipped at the air between them, more feral than just wild. Eve watched her, eyes wide and flooding with panic as she struggled and shifted in the girl’s grip. “Just _do_ it!” Villanelle let go and Eve fell to her feet, gasping for breath and dry heaving as the blonde paced. 

Villanelle rounded on her. “Do not _fucking_ tell me what to do!” she roared, stabbing a finger at her. “I am _tired_ of you telling me what to do! Konstantin telling me what to do, Carolyn and that little bitch of a boy Aaron!” A knife appeared in her left hand, glinting in the sunlight and she waved it about, following her humor. “Fuck you, Eve, _fuck_ you, you keep telling me what to do! You keep and keep and keep telling!” Her anger reached the rest of her limbs and she was hopping in place. “Fuck you!”

Eve pushed off the wall and got into her face. “Fuck you too you fucking psychopath!” she yelled back. “I fucking hate you and your superiority complex and your fucking outfits!” Villanelle suddenly quieted down, face going pale and eyes staring hard at Eve and Eve felt a shiver rush through her spine. She’d gone too far. 

The blonde stepped forward again and pinned Eve to the wall, both arms coming up to frame her shoulders, knife against her throat. She breathed harshly through her nose, nostrils flaring in and out and Eve lifted her chin, gazing back at her. “If you’re going to kill me, you’d better do it quickly, we won’t be alone forever,” she bit. “You wouldn’t want to get caught slaughtering me.”

“Oh,” Villanelle laughed but it was a mimic, not anything she felt. It couldn’t ever be. “I did not know you cared so much about me.” A taunt.

Eve’s lips pursed. “I don’t.”

The assassin’s face darkened again, more. “You do. You do not know what it is to not care.” She leaned in, murmuring, as if stilled in her emotions. “_You don’t understand what that is._”

Eve watched her, breath puffing in front of her. 

Villanelle took on a childish expression momentarily. “I am going to monologue now, okay?” She didn’t wait for a response. “I was told once,” Villanelle waved her hand vaguely. “I was explained to by a professional that I had not wanted to meet in the first place,” her hand landed back on the bricks by Eve’s head. “That this is how I process things as a human being with a fucked up prefrontal cortex or amygdala or whatever it is now that they blame my _condition_ on: I don’t care about you, Eve. I don’t care about you, or anyone. I care about myself and how other people make me feel and the first time hearing that? It felt preposterous of course and I,” Villanelle mimed the motion. “Stabbed the man with his own pen and bashed his head in with his clipboard and in that moment where I basked in the glory of his blood spurting out of his neck and the way his cranium had concaved I realized he was right. I told him that, of course. It was rude of him to be right,” she said, pausing her gaze somewhere on the wall behind Eve. “I did not care about how he lived or died or that he had said hurtful words; I cared that he had said them to _me_ and that _I_ was hurt and then I cared a lot about ending his life much faster. 

“I cared once about how you made me feel, Eve, that will never change. About how you piqued my interest enough that I did not throw you away because you always came up with something just short of a miracle and I wanted to see _just how far_ you would be willing to go to make me feel so fucking good.” Her nose brushed against Eve’s cheek. “Even if I could never and will never feel what you want me to feel for you with your little games in the way that you wish I would and that is your problem, not mine, but now with your games and your running and your shitty attitude, you are making me feel,” Villanelle breathed in sharply. “Annoyed.”

Eve stepped back but there was not much farther to go, the wall hard against her shoulder blades. 

“And Eve, darling Eve,” the blonde reached over to tuck a stray curl behind Eve’s ear. “Now, you have hurt my feelings more than you could ever imagine because,” she roughly tilted Eve’s chin back. “I do have feelings, and now you know how much I care about me.”

Eve swallowed thickly. “I know.”

Villanelle tilted her head mockingly. “Do you?”

“I would care about me too if I was you.”

“Would you?” the girl snapped. “I do not think you know how sensational I really am.”

“I know.”

“You keep saying that, Eve, I am starting to think you do not mean it.” She began to murmur. “Now, I will gut you like a fish, from groin to throat, and I will breathe your last breath. And I will leave you here. Because you are boring me. And I have no use for you anymore. But don’t worry,” Villanelle said, smiling. “I will not ever forget you, baby,” she cooed. “I could never.”

The knife began to dip into Eve’s skin and the Korean woman closed her eyes as her blood began to coat Villanelle’s fingers. Villanelle squeezed harder, taking her sweet time like she had promised she would years ago, and Eve’s eyes snapped open and they gazed at each other, a maddening look in the blonde’s stare that Eve was finding solace in.

Something fell and clanged to the floor fifty feet off and down the street and they both quickly turned to look, surprised in the moment of their ends.

There was a man, glancing down at the cannister that had fallen by his feet and looking up and them to stare, seconds becoming longer and longer. 

A shot rang out and Eve’s face was coated in more blood, her eyes slamming shut at the force of the impact, like a hull breaking the sound barrier. 

It was Villanelle’s screams that were drowning her own out and the blonde pulled away, holding her right hand between her knees. Eve replaced the hold on her neck with her own fingers to stop the blood from flowing; the girl jerking away had sliced neatly. Villanelle continued to yell, angry and anguished all at the same time. 

Eve watched her turn, balls of her feet sliding in bloodied pavement and the knife reserved for the catalyst to her funeral was sent flying across the street. The man was in full combat gear, gun in hand and with goggles on his eyes that didn’t shield him from the force of the throw, pupil the first victim, brain most likely the second. She panted, in shock and confusion at the scene that unfolded like if in slow motion, like if stuck in molasses. He dropped to the ground. 

Hand corralled around her neck, breathing heavily she pushed against the wall, she squealed. “W-What the fuck-!”

“What the fuck!” Villanelle echoed, roared. “What the _fucking_ fuck!”

“Calm the fuck down!” Eve yelled. 

The blonde turned, screaming an unholy scream and suddenly she was a banshee, windswept hair in the cold salted air of the Scottish coasts and Eve was yelling back, the waves crashing on the shore endlessly. 

They stared at each other when their voices finally broke, Eve’s throat finally clotting and Villanelle’s hand freely bleeding down her leggings, coating the inner of her thighs and shins. Eve took it in, as if finally understanding what had transpired, and she reached for Villanelle. The girl was holding her injured hand and she used her teeth and shoulder to get Eve away from her. Eve couldn’t see much but tendons and patches of loose skin that miraculously held the blonde’s ring and pinky fingers to the rest of her palm and she felt her stomach turn at the image. 

When they approached the man’s body, they found him struggling to live a few more seconds, gasping at the pain and free hand blindly grabbing at the knife embedded in his skull. Villanelle’s grasp was strong and she hoisted him up to her face. 

“Who are you! Who do you work for!”

He gurgled at her. Unsatisfactory. She took a knee on him, using her body weight to crush his genitals beneath her. His arms twitched randomly.

The man died moments later. 

Villanelle crushed him repeatedly under her dirty trainers and Eve had to pull her away. 

“Calm down, calm down goddammit!” Eve snapped, holding Villanelle like a mother would a petulant child, dragging her to another empty street. “If you keep doing that you’ll hurt yourself even more! Do you want to bleed out?” She tore one of her long sleeves off and reached for Villanelle, pressing just enough that the blonde howled in pain and gave over her arm obediently, letting Eve swaddle her split hand in a make-shift bandage. She wrapped it tight, as tight as she could with Villanelle squealing and pulling away and she let her go, Villanelle hissing as she held her maimed arm to her chest, cradling it. 

“Who is this, Villanelle,” Eve said. 

“My hand is torn off, Eve! I do not care!”

“I do! You trying to kill me is one thing but that guy? Who the fuck is he?”

“My hand is _falling_ off, Eve!”

Eve began to walk backwards, away from the girl. “The university hospital isn’t far, you know where the tram station is.”

Villanelle’s voice pitched up and she crumbled against the nearest wall. “You’re just going to leave me like this! Bleeding on the pavement!”

“How’s that feel?” Eve snapped back. The girl shifted and Eve felt her heart lurch sideways, watching Villanelle’s face fall until all she could see was the faraway look in her hazel eyes and the pain in her features and the absolute innocence and youth she really was. Barely a woman, inside a shell made of torture and hate and death and sex. Eve’s breath caught when she tried to speak and she cleared her throat, trying again. “You know we can’t do this.” 

“It hurts,” Villanelle murmured. Eve had heard her whine before, had seen her pout in the quest for a morsel of attention but now, withdrawn in on herself and bleeding through into her shirt, this wasn’t it. Eve helped her off the wall and wrapped her arm around her and Villanelle leaned heavily into her, sighing into her neck. 

“The hospital isn’t far,” Eve said. 

Villanelle laughed brokenly. “What is our story, then? How do you want to explain this?”

“What?”

“Your name, my name, how you got that nasty cut on your throat and why they are going to have to amputate my-“

“Jesus, no one is amputating anything,” Eve snapped. “Come on, your legs work fine.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Heyo folks!
> 
> Okay so as I'm posting this chapter, I'm sitting in my kinda empty room with luggages made as I'm, drumroll please, going back overseas in the morning to live with my fiancé! Four years of long distance relationship is hard, but it pays off my dudes.  
I've written the next chapter already but seeing as I'm going to need a power converter for my laptop, it will have to wait until I've bought one (that won't be too long). As soon as I have it, I will post the next bit which is longer, as to thank you all for your patience. 
> 
> Be good be safe my lovelies! <3
> 
> (PS: who, me? wanting to write a Star Trek AU of these ladies? Me? Who would make Eve a badass Starfleet security officer and Villanelle a Romulan? Meee?)


	10. I Reason with My Cigarette

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hello all!  
Thank you so much for your wishes of Godspeed, I arrived all safe and sound back in Ontario and have been doing lots and lots of canoodling with my bb and my kitty. I hate 8 hour airplane trips and I hope I won't have to do it again too soon D:
> 
> I hope you enjoy this chapter!! Love you all!

Villanelle’s ring and pinky fingers had to be amputated.

When Eve crashed back into her rented apartment that night, it was with a heavy sigh and a groan and with blood-soaked stains down her shirt. 

And an internationally known assassin trailing after her, subdued beyond recognition. 

She toed her shoes off and heard Villanelle do the same behind her, clunkily dropping her sodden trainers near the wall. She thought about turning around and facing her and thanking her for thinking of her floors and what she’d told her so long ago, in another home entirely but she refrained.

Villanelle had been oddly quiet since their _incident_, had let Eve half-carry her to the nearest emergency room and let her spin a story about an Erin and a Jessica visiting in-town and having been struck by a runaway bicycle. The first name had come from Villanelle’s fake ID in her back pocket and the nurse at the triage had believed her loose bike story; it almost seemed common, these types of incidents. Waiting in the emergency room, a near-death pale Villanelle had dropped her head to Eve’s shoulder and stayed silent, still, and Eve had worried but said nothing. She felt guilty. 

It was past midnight when the blonde was returned to her, arm in a sling and numb up to her neck and Eve had walked her back to what she had been calling home this last month, letting the girl lean heavily against her again. She couldn’t really deny her that. Her neck injury was barely a scratch compared to what Villanelle had gone through. She’d been hurt before, Eve knew that, but she’d never _lost_ anything. 

Well, not body parts, anyway.

She let Villanelle crash into the couch, face buried into the back padding and hiding, and Eve stepped into the kitchen to prepare them both tea. She had earl grey and mint and she chose one of each so that the girl could pick herself. If Villanelle would have chosen for her on a whim she would have been right, Eve would never dare. She waited for the boiler to hiss and poured the water into the mugs, placing them on a tray and bringing it out to the living room. Villanelle hadn’t moved.

“You should drink something,” she said softly. “It’s been a long day.”

The blonde shifted, peered at her older counterpart with an open eye that held a world of emotions, but she didn’t move to sit up. Eve fell into an armchair opposite her and curled in on herself, knees up to her chest and tea warming her chest and face. The clock in the hallway ticked and Eve almost stood to go knock it down, fingers itching as the minutes passed and she downed her tea. 

“I am right-handed,” Villanelle offered quietly. She lifted her bandaged hand to her face and frowned. “I was, anyway.”

Eve’s stomach bottomed. “I’m sorry.”

The girl sat up and crossed her legs beneath her, shrugging away Eve’s heartfelt comment, deflecting it like it was nothing, and reached for her tea with her left hand. “How did you get this place?” she asked, eyes watching her over the rim of the mug. Catlike, if not tired. “I would think you were left with nothing after-“ she trailed off. 

“I uh,” Eve shrugged lightly, itching to find something to busy herself with. “Found the key under the mat.”

It was a real laugh that erupted from Villanelle and Eve watched her curiously. It didn’t seem like a mimic: it sounded unapologetically Russian, childlike, and the Korean woman began to laugh too, smiling across at Villanelle. 

“You will never cease to amaze me, Eve Polastri.”

“God, you’ll never cease to amaze me, either,” Eve breathed. “Your pain tolerance is-“

Villanelle raised an eyebrow. “Amazing?”

“I’m just saying I wouldn’t be holding out as well as you in these circumstances.”

“It really fucking hurts,” Villanelle said. “I never believed in phantom limbs, I thought it was just,” she paused, crinkling her nose and picking a London accent. “Hogwash. I watched them clean and suture what is left of my knuckles but I cannot tell if the scars will be any good.”

“There’s a Hermès shop at Homme de Fer, maybe they sell gloves?” 

Villanelle watched her blankly and then she blinked and finally she smiled tiredly. “Thank you, Eve.”

“Why?”

The blonde shrugged and she became sheepish and Eve retreated into herself, itching at the bandage around her neck, wondering if Villanelle’s outer exterior had finally shifted back into place.

“You should sleep,” she suggested. “The drugs should be kicking in by now.”

“They have been,” Villanelle said. “I am used to pushing the drowsiness away though.”

“Maybe not tonight, alright?”

She helped the blonde up the stairs, noting that each step they took the assassin became heavier, as if having followed Eve’s command and threatening to fall asleep with every breath she took and Eve pushed her into her bed. She hadn’t made it before leaving (running away) and she felt a pang of guilt at swaddling Villanelle in sheets she’d been using but the girl didn’t care, swallowed in the comforters. Eve began to tiptoe away but a hand grabbed at her wrist and she turned, hazel eyes gazing at her in the dark. A left hand.

“Stay.”

“I’ll take the couch, Villanelle. I don’t want to bother you.”

The tug was insistent. “Stay. You owe me that.”

Eve nodded after a moment and slipped her jeans off, settling in beside Villanelle in her ripped t-shirt still, breathing in French perfume and blood. The blonde turned to face her and the reminiscent memory hit Eve like a tidal wave, throat tight. Villanelle’s injured hand lay between them, coddled by both their pillows and Eve fought the need to cradle it to her chest, to apologize. 

She closed her eyes as Villanelle’s breathing evened out, ears perking up momentarily when she spoke.

“How do you know the owner will not come back?” Villanelle murmured.

“I don’t.”

When Eve opened her eyes the next morning, bleary and feeling like a pound of bricks had nestled its way in between her eyes, she noticed she’d ended up on her back with the pillow beneath her shoulder blades. Villanelle hadn’t strayed far: she had stayed on her side facing Eve with either knees around Eve’s left thigh. She was soft, Eve noted, and warm. She’d had Villanelle against her more times than she was willing to admit and each time she was surprised at how unlike a viper Villanelle felt. 

The assassin slept on and Eve let the sheets lull her back in as she pondered, raising her arm and placing her hand behind her head, and when she shifted she realized the girl’s bandaged hand was resting on her collarbone. She began to blush furiously and she was thankful that Villanelle slept. She wanted to hold her hand, kiss the inside of her wrist, apologize somehow but the blonde would make fun of her or call her corny in the same voice Kenny would use so she refrained.

“You think very loud.”

Eve glanced at Villanelle, smiling apologetically. “Sorry.”

Villanelle’s eyes opened and Eve appreciated the small crow’s feet at their corners. The blonde looked between them, noticing her hand but she didn’t move it away, stretching her fingers instead. 

“This will definitely hurt my chances with the ladies,” Villanelle deadpanned. 

“Or it can be an icebreaker.”

The blonde’s stare was harsh. “You and I need icebreakers?”

Eve threw the sheets off of her, suddenly too warm. “Alright, time to get up.” She ignored Villanelle’s whines and made her way to the bathroom to turn the sink water on as loudly as she could while she screamed internally. The bandage against her neck came off with difficulty, dried blood and dirty glue sticking to her skin and peeling awkwardly. The gash had started to close around the non-perforating stitches and she fingered it gingerly, picking at it like she knew she wasn’t supposed to. In the mirror she watched the bathroom door open and Villanelle slip through, still wearing the clothes from the night before, like she was. An appreciative look glossed over her and she rolled her eyes back. 

Villanelle tipped an imaginary hat, ambling over to her side. “I have a surprise for you,” she drawled. 

“You’re going to need to watch a lot more John Wayne movies before you have that accent down,” Eve replied. 

The Russian lilt was back. “Rude.”

“What’s this surprise, Villanelle? I’m trying to get ready here, we’ve already overstayed our welcome. You just killed a man and left our blood all over the street and it’s not going to take forever for the gendarmerie to think of checking hospital records.”

“They did not take my blood for sampling, Eve, and I signed in with a fake social security card. Anyway, we are not worth the gendarmerie, it will be the police municipale at best, and they are practically worthless.”

“Forensics is gendarmerie, Villanelle.”

The girl shrugged. “For training, yes.”

“Your blood _is_ on file, you know that, right?”

“Did you label it?”

“Excuse me?”

Villanelle sighed shortly. “Your work, it was top secret, yes? You had my blood, my fingerprints, but did you ever label it with Scotland Yard? Interpol?”

“I,” Eve looked away. “Unofficially, it was labeled at our office, yes. Officially…”

“I do not exist.”

The ex-agent grunted and turned to grab a towel, seafoam green. She turned back around when she was prodded in the side. It was Villanelle’s injured hand.

“Help me,” she said. “And I will tell you.”

Eve groaned but did what she was asked. Villanelle watched their reflection, watched Eve untie her bandages and reach for the first aid kit in the mirror cabinet, their reflections warping momentarily. 

“Tell me if it hurts,” Eve said.

“Maybe I like it when it hurts.”

The older woman shot her a warning look and began to clean the wound, checking for bandage fluff stuck in crevices and hushing the girl soothingly when she dabbed at the stitches with a cotton ball soaked in medical alcohol. 

It was grotesque, really. 

She knew the medical staff had done the best they could with what they’d been given, what had been left of Villanelle’s hand. She’d gotten a good, rare look at the damage between Villanelle being ushered into a room and the door closing and it had churned her stomach. She was sure that if Villanelle were to tug half-heartedly, her fingers would have come off completely. The surgeon hadn’t been able to reattach them to her hand, her bones had been crushed by the bullet into a pulp and the remaining tissue was left looking like batter mix. 

The scars were angry and red but clean; they’d found antibiotics that worked on the assassin. She’d proclaimed to the nurses she was allergic to the most common ones. They’d believed her. 

Villanelle’s hazel eyes were trained on her hand, face devoid of anything telling. “I know you did not get any answers, yesterday.”

“Don’t worry about it,” Eve muttered. “Let’s be honest, I doubt we’d have found any.”

“That is why I found this.”

Eve looked up, black eyes wide, as Villanelle held up her left fist and opened her hand, two circular ID tags at the end of a nylon cord dropping to hang between them, swaying lightly. 

“British military tags,” Eve breathed. “Holy shit.”

“You are very welcome.”

“Holy _shit_! Where did you get this!”

Villanelle pulled back slightly. “On that man who tried to kill, well. I do not know who he was trying to kill.” She tapped her chin thoughtfully. “You or me?”

“Gimme that.”

The girl held on for a moment too long, a tug-of-war commencing before she finally let it go with a small smile and a wink. She settled herself onto the bed, leaning back on her elbows. 

“Fuck,” Eve whispered.

“I thought you might like that.”

“Fuck, Villanelle.”

The blonde’s smile grew. “Eve.”

Eve’s voice was becoming shrill. “Do you know what this means?”

Villanelle smirked joylessly. “That he was a terrible shot and now we know why?”

“It means MI6 knows where I am! They know I’m with you!” Eve began to pace. “Oh my god, they must think we’re working together.”

“Aren’t we?”

“I’m trying to kill you!” Eve yelled. “You’re trying to kill me!”

Villanelle frowned. “You do not have to yell, Eve.”

The Korean woman ignored her, racing for her backpack. “I need to get out of here.”

“What, now? What happened to killing me? Me killing you?”

“Fuck, you’ve still got time before I leave through that door. If you do it’ll keep the satisfaction of it from the _fucking_ government!” Eve snapped back. “Oh God, I’ve gone rogue. I killed a man. Fuck.”

Villanelle held her hands up, eyebrows raised. “You’ve killed more than one man, Eve.” 

Eve watched her for a moment before sitting down heavily at the end of the bed, head in her hands. “I’m fucked. He can’t have been the only one here.” Eyes closed, she reached for her laptop. 

Villanelle sat up and inched forward, placing her chin delicately on Eve’s shoulder. Her slender fingers from her left hand stopped her mid-motion. “If they are after you, this is how they found you. You know that, right?”

“What?”

“Who gave you this computer?”

Eve breathed out, stricken. “Kenny did.”

“Oh, Eve.”

The Korean woman threw the computer off of her and it fell to the floor with a clatter and another well-placed curse. “Just kill me, Villanelle. Just end me.”

“I already told you I do not like you telling me what to do,” Villanelle breathed. She began to pout. “Anyway, I would want it to be a special occasion. I am sure you understand that.”

Eve breathed through her nose harshly, feigning a laugh. “A side street was special to you?”

Villanelle shrugged. “You had made me angry, running from me.” Her finger tapped against Eve’s neck and she encircled the woman in a vice grip. “God, I was so close.”

Eve turned in her arms but only slightly and she felt Villanelle nose her ear, breathing her in. “I’ve been pretty close too.”

Villanelle purred into her neck. “I will do you a favor.”

“Oh god.”

The girl got a dreamy look in her hazel eyes. “I will kill you now, so that you are not caught later and tortured.” 

Eve scoffed. “And then what, you’ll disappear? You can’t, there’s going to be some kind of tech tracing you. If there isn’t already, somehow.” She pulled away. “They’re after you too, you asshole.”

“I can handle myself.”

Eve took Villanelle’s bandaged hand and the girl’s hazel eyes went wide with innocence then mistrust and then acceptance, sighing softly. Eve turned her wrist around and then she was pushing, slowly and then harshly and Villanelle began to yelp, her bandages turning pink and then a deep red. Villanelle twisted, tried to escape Eve’s grip but the Korean woman didn’t relent. Villanelle, tears dotting the corners of her eyes, wrapped her thighs around Eve’s waist and flipped them over until she was straddling the older woman and able to wrangle her arm free, breathing heavily and with more than just warning in her gaze.

“You’re crippled,” Eve murmured. 

Villanelle’s eyes flashed and she placed her good hand around Eve’s neck, squeezing lightly. “I never am.”

“Then do it.”

The assassin watched her, injured limb against her chest. Her thighs tightened around the ex-agent under her who wriggled awkwardly. Her canines were sharp, bloodthirsty. “I hate you so much.”

“I’m not trying to tell you what to do or anything, but either you get on with it and do it now or you let me drown in the bathtub.”

“You are not suicidal.”

“I’m feeling pretty suicidal right now.” Eve sat up suddenly, Villanelle threatening to fall off. “Oh my god, the Twelve.”

Villanelle grimaced, nose scrunching as she righted herself. “What about the Twelve?”

“They’re still after you! What if they send more people? The word must have gotten out by now-“

“I would think it sweet that you care if you were not the one to have sent them after me in the first place,” Villanelle cut in. “That has already been taken care of.”

Eve’s eyes narrowed. “What do you mean?”

The girl shrugged. “I explained the situation to them. They were happy to know it was a mistake, since I had already killed quite a lot of their men. It is not easy finding good help these days, you know?” 

“It wasn’t a mistake, Villanelle-”

“Wasn’t it?”

“-so what did you tell them exactly?”

“I pinned it on Carolyn.” Villanelle smiled. “Which is not completely wrong, after all. And they already have quite the dossier on her, one more chapter will not harm her.” She leaned into Eve. “So now it is just you, and me.”

“And MI6.”

Villanelle waved her hand, as if dismissing the thought and finally she stood to cross to the window, peering outside. “Would you like to sightsee? The cathedral here is gorgeous.”


	11. How Did You Get That Way, I Don't Know

Eve had never considered herself to be scared of heights but the cathedral’s platform was high enough that it made her head swim and she wondered why airplanes taking off didn’t make her feel the same. Maybe it was because she could see herself on the cobblestones, broken and battered and bleeding from every orifice, having been pushed off and over the side and down to street level. 

Villanelle’s shadow looming over her.

The wind swept around, sucked in by the vortex that was the solitary tower and Eve knew Villanelle watched her hungrily, her hair swept up by the breeze. The climb up had been torturous, and the blonde was covered in a light sheen of sweat that made her glow in the most positive light, sweat that on Eve most likely made her look like a drowned rat. Eve thought of the girl’s strong hands against her shoulder blades, pushing at her knotted muscles and the top of her body folding over the railing and her legs following until the wind flying past her ears became hard, hard ground. She wanted to be a tourist down in the plaza, looking up at herself so close to death. 

She placed her hands around the metal railing, knuckles turning white with the force of her grip and Villanelle sidled up next to her to lean elbows on it, amazingly taking up more space metaphorically, others on the platform steering away too naturally for Eve. 

The blonde cleared her throat, eyes on the far away horizon. “They say there is a doorway to hell beneath the cathedral.”

Eve sighed shortly. “Do you think there is?”

“Why not?” Villanelle shrugged. 

“Okay.”

The assassin’s gaze slid to her counterpart, blankly. “What were you going to do, Eve, if your hired help had murdered me?”

Eve’s curls flew as she whipped her head around, hissing. “Could you watch what you’re saying? We’re not alone.”

Villanelle sneered. “That is what bothers you about all this?”

“What the hell are you talking about anyway, Villanelle?”

“If they had stabbed me, shot me, drowned me.” Villanelle pushed to stand closer, overhanging. “You do not have the money you promised them, do you, and the Twelve are very, very particular about all parties coming away satisfied with their terms.”

“I,” Eve swallowed thickly. “I hadn’t thought of that. Hadn’t thought that far.”

“Of course, you had not,” Villanelle echoed. Her hazel gaze made Eve squirm. “Just like you had not thought about your boss not liking you acting like a cowboy riding into town.” The Korean woman glanced at her, grimacing, but said nothing. Villanelle circled around her, ending up on her other side. “I think you are so obsessed with one thing at a time that suddenly you are unable to think of anything else and you get this tunnel vision and you get _stupid_ about everything else.”

“Villanelle, do we have to do this-“

“You went and involved Kenny, basically a child, and Konstantin and the family he wants safe. You went as far as going to his safe house, Eve, that is messed up. You had me kill for this little ego stroking quest of yours because, what, I did not rub you the right way? I did not bend over backwards at your every whim?” She watched Eve’s eyes slam shut and leaned in to murmur in her ear. “If you had wanted me to bend over for you, you just had to ask.”

“I wish you wouldn’t.”

Villanelle hummed and broke into a wide smile. “How is Niko?”

“Niko?” Eve blinked, confused, an owl in her tree. It hit her. “Oh God, Niko.”

“Oh God, Niko,” Villanelle mocked. “You are selfish, Eve. You did not even think that when you broke off from MI6 and hired literal assassins that maybe, just maybe, that would bring you trouble?” She was hissing in Eve’s ear now. “That a disappearing act would put all your friends and family in danger? And it takes someone _else_ to remind you that they exist? That, oops! You are not the sole center of the universe! When you fuck shit up, Eve, you get to clean it up. That is the consequence when you are a selfish bitch.”

“Stop, Villanelle.”

“Or what? You will send people after me to kill me? Too late, Eve.”

Eve rounded on her. “Why do you always do this?” she yelled. “Why do you always lash out when you aren’t getting what you want? You’re just as selfish, you said it yourself! You only care about yourself! I don’t see how I’m being selfish when I’m trying to rid the world of the worst fucking person that exists! Yea, okay, I forgot about some logistics but fuck! You’re an assassin!”

“I own what I am,” Villanelle spit. “You do not, and that is a thousand times worse. You are selfish and you are a prick and you dare try and tell me that I am as bad as you?” She laughed, eyebrows raised. “Are you fucking kidding me, Eve?” 

“Why here, Villanelle?” Eve demanded. “You brought me all the way up here to yell at me? Really?”

The blonde blinked. “I like the view.”

“Fuck off, won’t you?”

A scoff. “It is not my fault you cannot take criticism.”

“I hate you so fucking much, you know that? God, I should have finished off the job and left you in that fucking side street,” Eve snapped. 

Villanelle’s eyes were strikingly green, cold, callous. She worked the inside of her cheek, jaw shifting beneath her skin and Eve thought then of a cobra about to strike, an eel with too many sets of teeth. “I will be down in the plaza. Come and find me when you have found your manners, hmm? Maybe I will have found a way into hell in the meantime?”

Eve gaped, watching the blonde walk away and retreating into the shadows of the cathedral’s arches, hearing her heels hit the pink limestone stairs one at a time. She found herself jumping on the balls of her feet in unending sudden rage, her fists gripping at her hair as she bent down. She knew people watched her, could hear the expletives she was letting out through clenched teeth in between exasperated grunts, and she didn’t care. She thought of jumping off the side of the building, bones crunching and organs splattering into thousands of pieces of pure mush right there at Villanelle’s feet and staining her expensive shoes beyond repair so that she was forever a pain in her side; unable to be washed away, shot down. She rested her head in her hands again, eyes shielded from the dying sun by her flying curls. The migraine starting behind her left eye was going to be a tough one to get rid of. Its name was Villanelle and she wanted to take a spoon and dip it under her eyelid and scoop her eyeball out, grimy bits and all. 

“Hello, Eve.”

Eve dug the palms of her hands into her eyes until she saw stars and then she waited a bit more. “This just isn’t my day, is it?”

Carolyn blinked. “Well, I wouldn’t quite know. Is it?”

The ex-agent sighed and passed a fist over her mouth but ultimately, she decided not to turn around, knowing her elder would come stand at her side anyway.

She did just so. 

“Eve, this is becoming quite the problem.”

The Korean woman’s head snapped to the side. “You fucking think?”

Carolyn effectively ignored her. “You see, Eve, I put myself out on the line to let you run around Europe with little to no consequences because I honestly thought that maybe, finally, you would take care of this little problem for us,” she said. Her eyes slid to the staircase where Villanelle had stood minutes before. “I would even have let the unfortunate passing of that man in Rome fly under the radar. I would have ignored the man in Ostrava, I think. The tracker you murdered just a few streets away would have been harder to comb through but it could have been done. I do wish you two hadn't murdered him.”

Eve watched her carefully, breath hitched in her lungs and making her head swim.

Carolyn kept her gaze on the skyline. “And while I’m used to you taking your time to get to the tasks assigned to you, this little honeymoon of yours with an international assassin is becoming tiresome and frankly, out of line.”

“What-“

The MI6 agent looked at her, lips pursed tight. “If you are unable to finish your mission, then you are a liability to us. The government has enough issues with terrorism without adding you and Miss Ostankova into the mix.” 

“_What_ fucking mission!” Eve broke through. “What the fuck are you talking about? You left me broke in Exeter of all fucking places and now you’re acting like-“ She paused, stricken. “Oh my god this was your plan all along. Like with Aaron. You tried to set me up. You’re setting me up!”

“Quite,” Carolyn said. 

“Fuck!”

“Eve, I would appreciate it if you kept your language to a minimum, this is a very diverse city and you never know who speaks what.”

“Oh my god.” Eve’s body slumped forward. “You’re not part of the Twelve.”

“Of course I’m not.” Carolyn fought a yawn. 

“But you want her dead.”

“Naturally. She is a liability, Eve.”

“Are you the one who had my divorce with Niko go through?”

“Cutting any ties you had left with friends or family was the fastest way of getting you out into the field.” Carolyn sniffed. “It was actually quite easy, you didn’t have much ties to cut in the first place.”

Eve’s mouth opened and closed. “I’m really tired of you orchestrating everything and not telling the players what’s going on.”

Carolyn shrugged lightly, blinking. “Players ask too many questions.”

“Oh, I hate you.”

“Understandable.” 

“What do you want from me, Carolyn?” Eve snapped. “Can’t you just make it fucking clear?”

The woman looked out across the railing. “We need to be rid of her.”

“Look-“

Carolyn’s tone was harsh. “I can save you, Eve. Not Eve Baek, mind you, but you as your body. Your earlier transgressions will be ignored, though Hugo might never forgive you. I can find you a new identity, a new life, and a way out of a lifetime in prison for three murders and two assaults. The death sentence is outlawed now, of course.” She squinted. “Shame, that.”

“You want me to kill her.”

“Isn’t that what you were already here for? I’m quite upset I had to ask you myself, you understand. Kenny and I had a dinner planned.”

“Sorry,” Eve said, far from meaning it. 

They watched each other a little longer, Eve with her eyebrows raised and Carolyn with hers raised even higher. 

“Is that all?” the elder asked. 

Eve sputtered, wringing her hands before finally huffing out in desperation. “Fucking whatever!”

“Can I count on you then?” There was a hint of a smile on Carolyn’s face but no joy behind it. A sneer plastered in between two high strung cheeks. “At least this once?”

“Rude,” the Korean woman snapped. She hated how she parroted Villanelle, but she didn’t answer right away. Could she? She wanted to, there was no limit in the ‘want’ department. And she, somehow, had enamored (could that be the right word?) the assassin into a certain sense of security, nothing false there. She unflexed her fingers, palms dented by the negatives of her fingernails. She had her parents to think about, her friends, or what was left of them. Niko, even. “Yes, I can do it.”

“Good.” Carolyn went to pass her hand on Eve’s shoulder but refrained, Eve already moving away to avoid her. She clasped her hands together instead. “Have you tried flammekueche yet? It’s a disgrace you can’t find them outside of Alsace, unlike other regional foods. I can’t recommend it enough.” She flipped her collar up against the wind. “Goodbye, Eve. Do try to do what you’ve been told to do?” She disappeared through a door the ex-agent hadn’t noticed before. That no one seemed to notice.

Eve wished every step down back to level ground that she would trip and fall the rest of the way, breaking her neck and her back and hopefully rupturing something in between that would have her bled out like a pig before she reached the bottom. 

That didn’t happen.

The wind was just as rough down in the streets and she crossed her arms around her middle as she looked for Villanelle through the crowd. Halfway between summer and the Christmas market, the plaza was far from as full as it could sometimes be, German and Russian and Italian mixing in a gaggle of sounds that had her turning her head too often. 

“C’est notre voyage de noce,” she watched Villanelle roll her eyes comically, a smile tugging at her lips. “Mais vous connaissez les femmes, y’a toujours quelque chose qui cloche ! ”

The man across the blonde, behind his souvenir cart, nodded awkwardly. He seemed to notice Eve and Villanelle turned towards his wayward gaze.

“Ah, la voilà. Ça va, chérie ? ”

Eve frowned, wrapping her arms around herself tighter. 

Villanelle grimaced and turned back to the vendor. “Je crois que ce n’est pas le moment pour un bonnet cigogne, mais merci. ”

The girl slithered her arm into the crook of Eve’s elbow and they ambled away and Eve could tell she was being led more than strolled. 

“Konstantin always told me that there are two rules to doing what we do,” Villanelle said.

“We?”

The blonde ignored her. “Rule number one, trust no one. Rule number two, never stay in the same place too long.” Her right hand floated between them, bandaged and swollen and hurting. “We have been here too long.”

“Again, ‘we’?”

“What, Eve, I cannot make sure the pigs do not gut you?” Villanelle’s eyes narrowed. “I figure I owe you one.”

Eve barked out a laugh. “Excuse me?”

The girl shrugged. “You stab me, I shoot you. You take me to the hospital-“

“You found the ID tags. We’re even,” the woman replied. She wrenched her arm away and Villanelle glowered at her. 

“That is very rude, Eve.”

“Don’t,” Eve warned. “I don’t want to deal with you right now. Why would you feel like you suddenly owe me anything? That’s not like you.”

Another shrug. “I saw that cute stork hat and I just knew it was made for you, and I just could not be mad at you anymore.”

“Fuck off.”

Villanelle grinned. “You got me,” she fingerbanged the woman weakly, ironically. “You remember me telling you about the whole, you know, caring thing?”

“What about it,” Eve muttered.

“Suddenly, I care about me being cared about you a lot more, since the hand thing.” Villanelle waved her injured hand about. “You have a purpose again, if for now.”

“How kind of you to say.”

The blonde’s features darkened, back to her natural state of decay and irrationality and she kicked her foot against a cobblestone. “We have been in this city too long. Are you ready to go?” she asked gruffly. Eve didn’t respond but Villanelle turned and began to walk away at a brisk pace, leaving the woman rooted to her spot and gazing after her. She bit the inside of her cheek to blood. 

Eve ran to catch up with the girl, huffing because Villanelle’s legs were so much longer, and her fingers wrapped around her wrist. She ignored the sudden stiffness, the way Villanelle fought her instinct of turning and killing. “Where do you want to go next?” she sighed out. Hazel eyes fixed her. “We can go anywhere, visit anywhere. Whatever you want.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Oopsies :3  
Thoughts, my dear friends?
> 
> xoxo
> 
> And yes, I'm from Strasbourg, it's where I just moved away from :3 Elsass Frei!


	12. The Places that I Go

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hey you guys, another chapter finally! I'm keeping up with my one chapter ahead goal and because I've been having a bit of writer's block, this is why this is a little later than my usual one week in between chapters. Even though I know where I'm going I just haven't felt like actually writing; the sun is going out and so am I! *jingles miserably across the floor*
> 
> Stick with me though, it's happening still :*

Eve wasn’t quite sure where to look. She knew the monoliths before her were priceless pieces of art but Villanelle, standing below them with her head turned up and her lips pursed in concentration, hands on her hips- Eve thought she rivaled them. 

She’d held back and was standing in front of little metal figurines in a glass case but not looking at them, head turned to the side and unashamedly gazing at the blonde obviously too entranced with the sight before her to notice Eve hadn’t caught up to her, or tried to. Eve shifted casually on the balls of her feet and dug her hands deep into the pockets of her cheap windbreaker before strolling over towards the girl. She stared up to into the larger-than-life faces of Kleobis and Biton, their small smiles permanently etched into their cheeks. 

“Are you having a staring contest with statues?” Eve asked softly.

“Do you not believe an artist’s soul goes into their work?” Villanelle replied. She didn’t break eye contact but searched for Eve’s hand. Eve tried to ignore the awkward feeling of holding onto just three fingers. “Is that not why we revere art?”

Eve shrugged lightly and she didn’t think Villanelle registered the shift, once again engrossed. She slid closer, fully anchoring her grip against the girl’s. “What does it make you feel?”

Villanelle’s head turned and she frowned, gazing into black eyes. “Nothing. Why should it make me feel anything?”

The woman blinked. “It’s just that, usually people say that art makes them feel a certain way. Admiration, fear, love. Respect.”

“Do you feel love, looking at these two?”

Eve laughed. “No.”

Villanelle nodded, seemingly satisfied. “I like looking into their eyes. Sometimes I think they will move before I do.” Her face fell blank again. “They never do.”

“I’d be worried if they did,” Eve muttered. “They’re pretty scary.”

The blonde said nothing and Eve subtly veered her away from the brothers in marble to the next room made of their kin, a sphinx watching from high above. 

It was raining over Delphi when they stepped out of the museum. The street dogs that had accosted them upon their arrival (and Villanelle had surprised Eve when she’d stopped to part with a snack for them) had long since gone. They stood together underneath the large tree in the middle of the institution’s now deserted stairs, wind whipping past them and bringing in large white clouds through the valley that obscured their view for long periods of time. Rain pelted Eve’s feet and she wanted to reach to pull Villanelle back a little but the blonde seemed to soak in the unforgiving wet, didn’t seem to care or even notice. They had originally planned to visit the rest of the site after its museum but it seemed a waste to try now. 

Booking a flight out of Entzheim had been easy; it was a small airport without much security that accepted cash and a quick flash of French ID cards and Eve couldn’t be thankful enough for the Schengen treaty. She had been the one to suggest the Balkans; somewhere deep enough in the wilderness where no one would recognize them; where their cellphones would blip out of existence. Villanelle didn’t care that Greece wasn’t the Balkans and had purchased one-way tickets to Thessaloniki without asking. Neither acknowledged that their plane seats weren’t next to each other. The blonde chattered with a young flight attendant and Eve kept her gaze on the ground, miles away. 

It was an archaeological roadmap that Villanelle had picked up on their way out of the airport that chose where they went next. Philippi. Olympia. Eretria. 

They strolled the museum pathways back to their rental car slowly, rain pattering around them in a light curtain. The village was minutes away by foot but Villanelle hadn’t asked Eve what she thought that morning, the short distance over in seconds and a parking spot stolen from a German family coming in from Itea. 

The car blinked awake and Eve slid into the sleek auto’s passenger seat. She began to close her door but Villanelle stopped her and they shared a moment, watching each other awkwardly. The car keys fell into Eve’s lap unceremoniously.

“You go back.”

Eve blinked. “And you?”

Villanelle shrugged lamely. “I do not feel like going back yet.” 

The Korean woman let her gaze wander, frowning in thought. “Did something happen?”  


The response was harsh and quick. “Why should something happen for me to want time to myself?” 

Eve held her hands up. “Okay, sorry.” She softened. “Where are you going?” Villanelle scowled and she scrambled to continue. “I mean, I just, if I need to come get you for whatever reason.” The words hung in the air heavily.

“Maybe Arachova, it is nearby and in walking distance.”

“It is?”

“I need to stretch my legs.”

“You’re not going anywhere near Arachova, are you.”

Villanelle closed the passenger door and rapped her knuckles on the window lightly before turning and walking away. Eve watched her pull her hood up over her now soaked head and disappear around the bend in the road a minute later. 

The ex-agent slid herself over the middle console, inner thigh catching on the stick shift momentarily and she drove slowly back to their shared AirBnB. The streets were mostly empty, tourists driven into the restaurants and gift shops lining the sidewalks and once again Eve found herself peering out the window at the gyro shop and she thought she could hear her stomach grumble. She checked the radio clock as she paused at a stop sign and noted, disappointed, that it was too early still for her to go in. Shops were closed in Greece in the early afternoon. They’d been in Delphi three days and she’d had yet to try a gyro because of her timing. 

She made herself a cup of tea using the kettle provided by their host and sat herself in the armchair by the front door. Villanelle had been adamant on renting the highest priced apartment in the village and it was still relatively cheap. Eve hadn’t even bothered to propose to help pay: she didn’t have the money to cover their week long stay and Villanelle would never have let her take her wallet out. 

“I don’t even know where my fucking wallet is,” she muttered out to the empty room. No one answered and she breathed out, relieved. 

If she was wire-tapped, at least it wasn’t a two-way mic. 

She let her hand rest on the edge of the knife she’d pocketed in the kitchen. She considered closing the curtains and sitting in her man-made darkness to wait for her target; more a disappointed mother than a contracted murderer but willing to plunge the blade into tender flesh anyway. Willing, always, but could she? She drank from her cup. 

When Villanelle returned it was with the sun setting at her back and a plastic bag in between her remaining three fingers. She wasn’t wearing her rain jacket anymore and it wasn’t tied around her waist but Eve ignored it momentarily, instead standing up to take the sack from the girl’s grip. Villanelle pulled away. 

“I got it, Eve.”

Eve raised her hands up and backed away. 

It seemed to her like she’d been doing that a lot lately. 

The assassin stepped into the kitchen and fetched some plates and nudged one into Eve’s waiting lap; she sat herself cross-legged across from the Korean woman in another armchair. “Here.”

Eve blinked. “Gyros.”

“Two are for me,” Villanelle said. “I am hungry.”

The woman nodded, mouth open slightly. “Yea.” She frowned. “How did you know?”

The blonde glanced at her as she reached into the bag to grab her own portion. “Know what?”

“Nevermind.” 

Villanelle shrugged and Eve watched her scarf her first gyros down; still so amazed at how the girl ate. Hunched over, hackles raised as if her meal was about to be stolen from in between her long fingers. Her gaze wild. It made Eve think of Villanelle’s past; wonder if something had happened to her in her childhood that made her act like the animal she was now. A starved and starving dog licking its jowls free of worm riddled meat scraps. She fingered the outline of the knife in her pocket.

Eve placed her plate down on the low table between them. “Villanelle?”

“Hrmm.”

“Did Romania surprise you?”

The girl stilled, hazel eyes trained on her gyros. 

Eve nestled forward, knees bumping the furniture. “Did it?”

“Why would you ask that, Eve?”

“It’s, it’s just a question.”

“It is a very specific question, is it not?”

“No harm, no foul?”

Villanelle grimaced. “I do not know what that means.”

“It means it doesn’t hurt to ask,” Eve replied softly. “It means no grudges.”

“Grudges are-“ the blonde paused, pondered. “-I think grudges are important. It gives you a goal. A plan. Something to do to pass the time.”

Eve smiled. “You’re not a fan of ‘forgive and forget’?”

“No.” She continued to eat like a rabid animal, frowning now. “I shot you dead.”

“You might as well have, it hurt like a bitch.”

“Do not be ungrateful, Eve.”

The woman scoffed. “I wouldn’t dream of it.”

Villanelle huffed out angrily and threw the rest of her food down. It skidded across the coffee table. She wiped her hands on her jeans, near her knee, and began to sneer as she sat back in her chair. “Okay, Eve, you have my attention. Have at it.”

“What?”

“You want to talk about me shooting you, you want to talk about your catching of me in Romania. Please, go ahead, tell me how much better you are than me. Tell me you survived and got your revenge and caught me. Tell me how you have me right in your palm.” She sat forward suddenly and Eve pushed back into her own seat. “I do all I can for you, I let you sightsee, I save you from being murdered, I take you to countries you would never have thought of going to and I buy you food and bring you to museums and you treat me like this? You are always criticizing me, Eve, I am tired of it. You still have not found your manners.”

“Relax, will you?”

Villanelle chased after her gyros, biting into it with gusto. “You can just walk out, go, explain to the queen that you had a little mental breakdown and then get paid retirement for the rest of your miserable life in a shitty apartment in a shitty town. You obviously do not want to be here, and I do not think I want you to here with me anymore.”

“I don’t think,” Eve paused. “I don’t think MI6 will let me off the hook this time, Villanelle.”

“Oh well.”

Eve stood and stepped forward, downwind of Villanelle’s anger and mirth and hate. “Look, I know, I know I broke-“ she faltered. “I know I stabbed you, and I know Rome wasn’t ideal. And I know I’m not sorry for what either of us said or did and I know you aren’t, and I know you wouldn’t want us to be.”

“Are you going to tell me you do not want to die or kill me anymore? Are you about to make a flower crown and pat my head and tell me everything will be alright because the power of friendship beats all?”

Eve breathed out. “Right now, I was thinking we could just, put all of this animosity aside. I stop criticizing you, you stop gaslighting me.”

Villanelle sneered. “How romantic.”

“Do you still want to kill me?”

The blonde stood and stepped forward too until she was flush with the older woman, breaths mingling. She searched her face. “Every single breath I take is dedicated to your last one. I want to open you on either side of your spine and down, splay you open, and pick your ribs out one by one.”

Eve tilted her head, smiling softly. “How romantic,” she sighed. The knife dug into her thigh.

Villanelle’s lips curled upwards. She made a motion with her head. “Tell me something.” She bent her knees slightly and settled low and Eve had to lower her eyes to watch her. “How did you get away? From Rome?”

The Korean woman closed her eyes. “I don’t know.” Her eyebrows furled. “I just woke up in Exeter, of all places.”

“Exeter?” Villanelle laughed.

“It sucked,” Eve admitted. “I was there a while. A month, or two. And I got, bored.” Villanelle nodded knowingly. “So bored. And I hated you. I hate you. And I wanted to kill you for putting me there in that shitty room with a hole in my stomach.”

“How did you get out?” the blonde murmured.

“I didn’t kill anyone, if that’s what you’re wondering.”

The girl hummed.

Eve’s blush bloomed and she looked away. “I stole an officer’s uniform from the break room. It’s actually kind of scary how easily you can bypass security.”

“It’s thrilling, isn’t it.”

They watched each other, Villanelle’s hazel eyes boring into Eve’s black ones with an intensity that made the older woman’s chest ache. She nodded softly. “Yes.” Villanelle’s eyes flitted down and she watched, breath paused, as Eve took her hand in hers, fingers slotting together. She rubbed at dried blood that wasn’t Villanelle’s, dotting the girl’s fingers generously. A kill. A face most likely stranded and strangled by a jacket worth four figures. “I do want to be here.” The blonde’s head tilted up sharply. “With you.”

“Do not lie to me, Eve,” she breathed. “That would not be the healthiest choice for you. As you know.”

“When have I lied to you?”

Villanelle’s eyes narrowed, hazel slits against alabaster skin. 

The sanctuary of Delphi was frightfully empty and Eve almost wanted to play hide-and-seek between the columns, the statue bases. She wanted the Parnassus looming over them to loosen a rock so that she was crushed under the weight of the boulder, Villanelle along with her. She wanted the red bricks of the Roman agora building the tall back wall to come down and cover them until they asphyxiated. 

She wanted to cast Villanelle in bronze and leave her glinting in the sun in the orchestra of the theater. She wanted to sit on the stone cut seats and stare at the metal statue that was the blonde and die, blinded by her beauty. 

A gorgon. 

The assassin stood facing the Peloponnese; combat boots firmly planted on her perched rock, hands on her hips and high above the sanctuary. A trip through the mountains that had left her reinvigorated and Eve breathless from both the view and the exercise. An invader and her jingling fool perusing the land.

The wind covered Eve’s baited breaths and the crunch under her own security boots and she walked slowly up to the girl’s back, the view hidden by broad shoulders. The knife dug into her side but she didn’t reach for it. Falling off a cliff could be an accident, couldn’t it? Carolyn wouldn’t care how the blonde died as long as she didn’t get back up. Eve couldn’t agree more. 

She drove forward, trembling hands first and body and mind second. Her fingers hit cashmere, strangled the fabric in a tight grasp and she felt her shoulders push into her forearms. Rocks tumbled beneath them, shifted in and out from under their weight. 

Villanelle’s eyes were hard, steeled over, and her good hand at Eve’s throat in an instant. The Korean woman stood against the negative space that was the cliff’s edge now, shifted into position by the blonde now standing where she’d stood moments before. 

Eve grasped for Villanelle’s hand, holding on tight. “I didn’t want you to fall,” she spat out weakly. “I didn’t mean to scare you.”

Villanelle glanced behind the woman, eyes trailing down the valley. “It is quite the fall.” Her grip softened. 

“It is.”

Eve just couldn’t kill her yet.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Please let me know what you think, it keeps me going!


	13. Pleasing Everyone Isn't Like You

“Romania did surprise me.”

Eve glanced over, amazed at Villanelle’s sudden admission. It was an intrusion in her otherwise empty thoughts, scrambled though nothing swirled within. The Korean woman shrugged lamely and as hopefully as she could, wanting the girl to keep talking. 

“But it did not scare me,” the blonde added. 

“I didn’t think it would.”

Villanelle nodded, satisfied. “But it surprised me. Is that what you had wanted, Eve?”

“I guess, yea.”

“Why?”

Eve blinked and then laughed shortly. “I thought it would be obvious.” At Villanelle’s intense gaze, she shrugged again. “I was so tired of you jumping out at me around every corner and always being two steps ahead. I wanted to be the one to try it, you know?”

“Why?”

“Why, what?”

“Why try it? You are always claiming we are not the same, that you are a better person than I am. We had quite the fight about it, if you remember well.”

“Is that what we’re calling it now?” Eve smiled. She frowned. “Don’t say ‘why’ again.” Villanelle grinned cheekily at her before turning back to her window. 

Each trip they took, Villanelle stole the window seat. Demanded it like a child and Eve never wanted to find out if she would throw a tantrum like one too if she was told to sit in the aisle. They’d taken cheap buses and dusty backroads out of a Greece that had bored Villanelle much too quickly after all with no destination in mind; just the next bus station waiting at the end of the journey. 

“Do you like water?”

Eve grimaced. “What, like to drink? I mean, a good ‘G and T’ is more my style some nights,” she joked. 

Villanelle blew hard through her nose. “Like, the sea. The ocean, Eve.”

“Oh. Uh, yea, I guess?” Another frown. “Why?”

The blonde thrust a pamphlet under her nose, probably taken from one of their many hotel lobbies, and Eve struggled to read it as Villanelle shook it lightly in front of her. “Boats!”

“Boats?”

“Ships?” Villanelle questioned too. “I do not know the difference. A floating thing taking us from one place to another.”

“The difference is either size or function. I don’t know which, either,” Eve said absently. “You want a boat? Ship?”

“I would buy a yacht, personally, they are much nicer.”

“Honestly, I was barely over minimum wage at MI5, I can’t afford you a boat. Ship.”

Villanelle blinked. “Why would you want to buy me a yacht?”

“A yacht, then?”

They stared at each other for a moment; Eve in confusion and Villanelle with as blank a face as she was known for, yet her gaze shifted wildly beneath her high-strung eyebrows between Eve’s own black eyes. 

Their voices collided in their corner of the bus. “What?”

Eve’s light laugh made Villanelle grin a shy smile that the older woman found herself drawn to and she let her hand crawl forward on her thigh with her fingers outstretched. Villanelle’s bandages brushed against her but didn’t pull away. 

Eve cracked a knuckle; a small victory. “So, wait, water and boats-“

“I was thinking a cruise, Eve,” the blonde said. 

“Right. Two plus two equals cruise.” At that, Villanelle frowned at her. “From where? To where?” she continued.

“I would rather stay out of Romania, unfortunately it is a rather big country that we are quickly approaching.”

“You choose where we go,” Eve pointed out. 

Villanelle preened. “There is a ship leaving from Varna tomorrow morning, before noon.”

“Are we back to ships then?” Eve watched her. “You know I wouldn’t say no, so why ask?”

“Manners, Eve.”

“The real reason, Villanelle.”

“I do not want you getting seasick on my brand-new shoes.”

The Korean woman leaned forward and over to stare out the window. “When did we leave Macedonia?”

“Varna to Odesa, how does that sound?”

Eve slumped back in her chair. “Ukraine?”

Villanelle wriggled her eyebrows. “Maybe we could hide in Chernobyl.”

The ex-agent’s eyes were wide and she barked out a nervous laugh. When the blonde didn’t budge, her mouth dropped open. “Oh my god, you’re serious.” She righted herself in her seat. “Are you insane? We could die, we could be poisoned, get cancer-“ she paused, stricken. “-God, you weren’t even born then, were you? Fuck, you weren’t even born then. Of course you wouldn’t know anything about living through that actual horror, the day of, the fallout-“

Villanelle sniffed. “I saw that HBO special.”

Eve laughed again, from her belly this time. “Right.”

“I know what I am talking about, Eve.”

“Sorry, Villanelle, but you’re going to have to excuse my disbelief. What are you now, twenty-seven? Shy of twenty-eight?”

“My age does not factor into my knowledge.”

“No, but you didn’t live through that carnage. You can’t understand it unless you did.”

“My mother died of cancer when I was seven.”

Eve looked away, then back at Villanelle. Her gaze hit the aisle, her feet. Finally, she inhaled sharply. “I’m sorry to hear that.”

“The cause of death was radiation cancer, actually,” the girl continued. “Of course, that was not the official diagnosis, the one on paper. But that was what was whispered in the hospital halls; by the cleaning ladies who watched over me when my father was in another wing, by the nurses cleaning her bedsheets full of shit and piss, by the doctors wondering just what would become of me.” She shrugged. “Sores and skin on bones and thin hair on the floor, that is my carnage.”

“I’m sorry,” Eve whispered. 

“Good. You deserve to be.”

The silence was stifling and Eve couldn’t figure out how to position herself in her padded chair, her elbow straining as she lifted herself over and against the seat. She huffed out in frustration and exhaustion and she dropped back as limply as she could, arms thrown over her armrests. 

Eve swallowed heavily before clearing her throat. “If uh, if this is honesty hour-“ 

“Whatever that means.”

“I just,” the woman breathed out dramatically. “I just, maybe I want to know my friends and family will be alright?”

“Would you like me to act like I care?”

Eve looked at her pitifully. “Could you?” Villanelle’s eyebrows furled almost instantly and her lips curled down into a sympathetic smile. The Korean woman thought the blonde was about to place her arms around her. She almost wanted her to.

“I want to know I won’t be the root cause of an accident, or incident,” Eve said. “The murder of someone I love, care about, even like?” She wrung her hands together. “That knowing Eve Baek won’t bring anyone anymore harm, like it has in the past. Since I’ve known you, you know? Maybe that’s why I’m running around the world with you. I can’t decide yet if they’re safer when I’m with you, or as far away as humanly possible. Am I even safe?”

Villanelle dropped her façade. “You are sitting next to me, are you not?” She watched her almost innocently. “Eve.”

The woman’s face contorted with anger and she wrenched away. “This is me, trying to be honest with you, more honest than you have been with me. You could at least keep up the act you said you would. I was never ready for you, I don’t think I ever could be, and now I’ve put a shit ton of people in danger. Fuck, even you. Do you know how fucking terrified I am for my family? My coworkers?”

“Eve.”

“What!”

Villanelle bent over slightly, the elbow connected to her injured hand placed against her thigh. “Baek?” Eve blinked again and the blonde leaned in further, casting her hazel gaze upwards. “Did you leave Niko?”

“Niko-“ the woman bit her lower lip, suddenly ashamed. “Niko left me, actually.”

Villanelle laughed out gleefully, sudden and so honestly delighted that Eve was frozen in place, watching her with her own face falling. Other riders turned back and over to glance at them. Eve wanted to shush the girl, place the palm of her hand over her mouth, wrap her fingers around her throat and squeeze until she was silent. But she would keep the smile and that angered Eve. 

“Shut up, will you?” the woman muttered. 

“Oh, darling Eve. Honesty, then,” the blonde sighed out. “I do not care much about your family or friends, and especially not mustache man.”

“That’s obvious.” Eve rubbed at her forehead with her knuckles, another headache coming on. “A cruise is fine, Villanelle. Ukraine is fine.”

“Good stuff.” The blonde began to push the woman out of her seat and into the aisle. 

Eve stiffened to fight back. “What are you doing?”

“I need to pee.”

“I asked you if you needed to go before we left.”

“I did not need to go then, now I do. Move.”

Eve sighed audibly and stood, catching herself on the seats around her so she wouldn’t fall, and Villanelle pushed past her strongly. The Korean woman watched her amble down the bus and to the little stairs that led to the second set of entry doors and the bathroom that somehow was smaller than an airplane’s. Eve hadn’t gone in to use it herself but she’d had a look around. She was more on the paranoid end of the spectrum these days. 

Eve heard the door click shut but the lock didn’t latch into place and she didn’t sit back down. Instead, she let her feet take her down the aisle and after the assassin. She glanced back over her shoulder, watched the bus driver in his rearview mirror. God, the possibilities were endless. She pressed her ear to the cool PVC of the bathroom door and it smacked into her face as it opened slightly. 

Villanelle peered at her through the crack. “I do not think there is an equivalent to the mile high club in a bus, Eve.”

“You didn’t lock the door.”

“And?”

“I didn’t want anyone to think they could just walk in.”

The blonde’s one eyebrow furled lightly. “How chivalrous.”

Eve sighed. “Yea.”

The girl waited a moment and finally she closed the door again, forgoing the lock once more and Eve leaned in to press her forehead to the surface, listening to the shifts inside. She thought of the knife in her backpack, above their seats. She thought of breaking into the little room, swayed by the taut pulls of the vehicle, and stabbing Villanelle like the assassin had Bill in that nightclub, hundreds of miles away. She thought of opening the door wide, dragging Villanelle out by her arms and hitting the emergency entry door latch before pushing the girl out of the side of the bus, a firm kick in her slender back. She wanted to watch her body hit the pavement, bounce, leave bits and pieces of nail and tooth and skin. She could stride to the front and slide the edge of her blade along the driver’s throat and wait for the bus to veer off a cliff. Hopefully Villanelle would come sliding out of the bathroom door and thud against the windows before hitting the other side again, and roll again, and again. 

Eve sat back in their seats and slid into the one against the window, resting her forehead on the cold, ratting glass. 

When Villanelle came back she huffed lightly but took the aisle seat anyway, resting heavily against Eve’s shoulder. She sniffed at her hands. “The soap here smells cheap.”

“You’re lucky they even have soap.”

“I think I have water in my bandage. It itches.”

“That sucks.”

Villanelle glanced at Eve, scrunching her nose. “Wow, thank you for caring.” Eve sighed heavily and looked at her fully. The blonde pouted back momentarily and closed in, resting her chin fully on the woman’s shoulder now. “May I kiss you?”

Eve frowned lightly, looking back up into hazel green eyes, astonished that Villanelle would even ask. The question surprised her. The gentleness did not. “Will you kill me?”

Because Eve just couldn’t kill her yet.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Next chapter, the action starts back up again!  
Thank you for sticking by!


	14. Every Thrill is Gone

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Action! Action! Action!   
Let me know what you think!!

Eve’s voice was wrapping around the echo in the wind, dying against its front. “You said this was a cruise!”

Villanelle continued to walk, always the faster shadow. “Yes?”

The ex-agent stomped her foot lightly and flung her arms out angrily at their surroundings, pointing as widely as she could. “This is a car ferry!” she yelled over the sea. 

Her companion grinned wide, did a turn on herself so that she could walk backwards. A shark circling their hull. “A boat or a ship, then?” Little hairs stuck to her forehead, wet with rainwater. 

Eve stared, slack-jawed. 

“It is alright, Eve, we do not have to sleep inside the car.” Villanelle tilted her head to the side. “Unless you would like to.”

“I’m pretty sure you killed someone to get that car, so no thanks.”

“Pretty sure?” the girl pouted. “That is not what the MI6 agent I once knew would say.”

“Yea, well, we don’t really know each other, do we?”

Villanelle slipped around the cars on the deck, farther and farther away and Eve ran to follow her. “Why do you think you are here, Eve?”

“There’s no point in lying, is there? You’d just tell me what I told you. That I want to be.”

Villanelle nodded. “A good initiative. But why else?”

Eve breathed out harshly. “Don’t play games. It’s raining, it’s windy as fuck, I’m cold-“

“Because we are getting to know each other. Why else would you want to be near me at all? You have always wanted to be as near as you could be to me to get to know me. And so there is no ‘we do not know each other’ anymore, Eve. Or there should not be. We should be past that point now, I think.” She turned, her voice dropping to a stage whisper. “You did kiss me after all.”

Eve stopped dead in between two jet black Audis, the taller of the two sparing her from some of the whipping rain. Villanelle paused after a moment and turned to blink innocently once more, as she’d gotten used to doing.

“Why would you say that?” Eve whispered. 

“You did, though.” Villanelle’s eyebrows raised significantly. “You are a wonderful kisser.”

The woman hissed. “We barely-“

“You have nice lips. There is nothing to be ashamed of. Your age, or mine, or our genders.” The blonde cocked her hip out. “Or our current situation.”

Eve fisted at her eyes, pushing sudden tears and water drops off her face. “Fuck you.”

“The captain of this floating vessel was kind enough to secure us a room down below deck, if you do not feel like sleeping in the car I killed someone for.”

Eve laughed brokenly, wiping at her eyes again. “I knew it.” Villanelle gazed at her evenly but there was no smile to help the woman feel any better. 

The room wasn’t more than a bed and a small toilet with a sink but no shower attached and Eve hated how grimy she felt and how grimy she would have to be still twenty-four hours from then. She thought of looting around the ferry to find a sponge to at least give herself some kind of respite but Villanelle didn’t seem in the mood so she sat down on the bed instead. The sheets were rough and she took some small pleasure in knowing the blonde would hate them. 

But the assassin stood at the door, looking out of the small round window with her arms crossed in front of her. Finally she clicked her tongue, annoyed. “I am afraid our vacation is in trouble. We are being watched.”

Eve looked up, blinking a slow blink. “Huh?”

“So I need you to clean my hand and bandage for me, I need it dry.”

“What do you mean, watched? Like, bad people watching?”

“What is ‘bad people’ to you, Eve?”

“Villanelle!”

“I do not know, okay? A group of men followed us on here.”

Eve stood and tried to get a look over Villanelle’s shoulder, worried, but was barred. “Maybe they’re travelling too?”

“I hardly think so,” the younger replied. 

“How do you know?”

Villanelle scowled. “I am the professional, am I not?” 

“And I’m chopped liver?”

“What? What does that even mean?”

“Nevermind,” Eve said. “I guess we need a plan?” The assassin shrugged loosely. “No plan?”

“I do not see why. We can just lay low.”

“And be stationary targets? I thought you were a professional, Villanelle.”

“I thought you were not a killer, Eve?”

“I swear to God-“

“Alright, then, let us make a plan. Let us find a way to kill those men outside.”

Eve glanced towards the door and ducked into herself. “I didn’t say anything about killing them,” she hissed.

“Oh, you would let them live with tales to tell about where we are, where we were going?” the girl sing-sang. “Very professional.” She crossed her arms and lifted her chin, watching the woman from up high. “This is why I work for the Twelve, Eve, and why you work for idiots at computers. You are unable to act on your so-called convictions.”

Eve laughed harshly, bitterly. “Worked.”

“What?”

“Worked for the Twelve. I’m pretty sure you aren’t in their good graces anymore.”

“Worked,” Villanelle mimicked. “Worked for idiots at computers.” She pouted at her mockingly.

Eve mirrored her, teeth bared too. “You look ugly when you make that face, you know that?”

The blonde stared, both their breaths baited, and finally she made a sound that resembled a malformed shriek, hands thrown up in the air and she crossed the room quickly and slammed her way into the small bathroom. 

She locked the door.

Eve blinked, not too surprised at the actions, if not the outburst. She tried to ignore the muffled noises coming from the toilet as she paced the room lightly, the loud and continued rushing water rumbling through the pipes. The yelling. She was thankful now that whatever this room was, they didn’t own it outright; the girl was probably doing thousands in property damage alone, all by herself in the tight fit room.

The sea ebbed and flowed beneath their feet and it was twenty minutes before Villanelle came trudging out into the larger room, completely drenched below the belt.

The assassin ignored Eve’s pointed look. “The sink had an accident,” she sniffed. “And now my bandages absolutely need changing.” The ex-agent’s eyes trailed down to the girl’s hand limp at her side and she sighed shortly at Villanelle’s bloodied and ripped wraps, wound grossly showing through the peeping holes that dripped dirty water into the carpeted floor beneath. Eve crossed to her backpack and fetched a small first aid kit before thrusting it against Villanelle’s chest.

“You do it,” she snapped.

Villanelle’s eyebrows raised catastrophically. “Excuse me?”

“You fucked yourself up, you fix yourself up,” Eve said. “That’s consequences for you, isn’t that what you’re always telling me? That I don’t get to break shit and then expect someone else to deal with the aftermath?”

“But I can’t,” the girl whined. “I only have the one hand.”

Eve shrugged, far from sympathetic. “You should have thought about that before you went off and had your little temper tantrum.”

Villanelle’s face morphed, canines sharp and her eyebrows furled in a way that had the other woman’s spine edge up and out. “I do not care if this rots and turns black and falls off,” Villanelle spit. “If it does, it will be your fault.” 

Eve leaned forward to hiss back. “I don’t care.”

The blonde licked her lips, hazel eyes bright. “There is a nail gun beneath the toilet sink.”

The Korean woman scowled. “What?”

“It is not the best fatality wise,” Villanelle whispered. “But it is incredibly fun to use.”

Eve softened lightly. “What?”

“Those men outside are patrolling at random intervals, they are trying not to look suspicious. I had a good look at them while you were getting your bags out of the trunk of the car earlier. You took a little while.”

“Okay.”

“There are not enough nails for all of them, unfortunately, but I have a plan. I do not like being followed, by anyone. It can be dangerous.” Eve nodded, waiting for more, and Villanelle leaned in until their noses brushed. “How do you feel about pulling a heist?”

“Fuck.”

The blonde sighed out and she began to nuzzle into Eve’s hand that had jumped to her cheek, a long forlorn sigh that rattled through her lungs and out against the woman’s skin. “Good.”

“What if it’s the Twelve? Let’s say they’re after me,” Eve said. “You know, since I hacked into their mainframe or whatever. Wouldn’t they be pretty mad if you were to take my side?”

“I have taken your ‘side’ before, and they sent me one man. I am on your side now, whatever that means, and there are four men watching us. I guess I am their boogeyman.” She laughed. “Or Baba Yaga.”

Eve’s grip on Villanelle’s forearm tightened. “Don’t joke about that.” She glanced sideways. “It could also be, I mean, it could be-“

A scoff. Villanelle backed away slightly. “What, British Intelligence? They are not properly named, Eve.”

“Do you think the jokes can wait?” Eve wanted to grab her knife now and end it all, get it over with. Take her pains out and herself with it.

“I guess.” Villanelle thought for a moment. “We never did find out who the tracker in Strasbourg was after; there is so much choice! I am a cold-blooded serial killer, you are an agent gone rogue kissing said killer, God, who could they be after? It just might be British Intelligence on this boat today! Or is it the Twelve after all? After you, after me? The both of us?”

“You’re not a serial killer and you know that, first of all-“

“How kind of you to say.”

“Second of all-“

Villanelle cut her off. “Do not start denying that you kissed me, that would be insulting.”

“Okay, now I’m sure they are here for you and your annoying ass.” Eve spun on herself, hands in her hair tugging at her curls. After a long sigh she shifted her gaze towards the blonde. “A nail gun?”

Villanelle grinned.

Eve was the safest choice for bait; it didn’t matter whichever organization was outside on deck in the cold rain, neither would dare kill her. Maim, torture physically and mentally, Villanelle had assured her almost cheerily, but on this night she wouldn’t die. She’d whipped on a rainjacket that smelled much too much of Villanelle and pulled her hood over her curls as best as she could and she traipsed the ferry car park loosely. One foot in front of the other. 

Villanelle had unfortunately been right: four men on opposite ends of the vessel were casing the joint and now, were watching her eagle-eyed. She hadn’t been shot at; they hadn’t even taken a step towards her or crowded their room door. They were smart.

She rooted around in their accidentally rented car’s trunk for nothing specific, casting her black gaze from under her hood through the dark tinted windows. It was obvious Villanelle didn’t care to know if they were the Twelve or Carolyn’s men, she just wanted them gone and off their tail: she didn’t like being watched. And god knew Eve felt the same now. It was fucking dangerous. She just wanted to know where they stood, how often they moved, who was going for the occasional piss and when. 

And Eve would be a liar if the thought of pulling something remotely illegal hadn’t made her heart want to implode on itself. Anyway, Villanelle was her kill. MI6 or the Twelve, it didn’t matter as long as they stayed far away from Death’s Door while dragging a screaming and kicking assassin in with them. Her kill. 

When she slipped back into their room she murmured her findings into an eager ear. The blonde donned her own raincoat. 

Eve suddenly paused, anxious. “Do we have to?”

“What, save ourselves?” Villanelle mused back. She tilted her head to meet Eve’s gaze. “They will not let us off this ship, you know that, right? Not freely, anyway. Either in cuffs, or dead. I do not know who they want, but they will get their job done unless we get ours done first.”

“And our job is what, killing?”

“I just wanted to scare them, but if you would like to kill-“

“I didn’t-“

“I am joking, Eve,” Villanelle said. “Even psychopaths can make jokes.” She made a face at Eve’s staring and finally shrugged it off. “I will just break a few bones, knock them around a little bit. That is also fun. And we will keep one awake and ask him the questions you would like to ask, yes?” 

Eve nodded and swallowed thickly. She frowned. “Don’t you have questions, yourself?”

“No. I am always followed, am I not? By them, by you. At this point, I take joy in knowing that the would-be killers will not get paid. You are the detective, Eve, not I. Pass me my backpack, will you?” Eve did as she was told and Villanelle stuck her hand down past the zipper, ignoring its teeth rushing past her skin and she pulled out a smoke bomb. “Ready?”

The lowest deck was painted a horrid light gray and done in thick brush strokes and it made Eve shiver, how cold and impersonal it was. Villanelle’s hand in hers made her arm tingle with the warmth the girl exuded and she could feel the back of her teeth aching at the difference in temperature. It made her vibrate. She’d let the assassin drag her down the service stairs and they’d taken stand in a cul-de-sac type of corner as Villanelle rooted around some more in her backpack. She’d had Eve fill her own to the brim with what she thought would be necessary; they wouldn’t be able to take all their bags with them. The fire alarm mechanism glowed a deep red by their shoulders when they kneeled together.

Villanelle pulled Eve to her tightly and as she pushed strands of hair aside, held up a small plastic bag stamped with a market store’s name. “Gas masks,” she said. “We should wear them for what is to come.” She reached into her backpack once more and handed Eve the nail gun. 

It was heavy in the Korean woman’s hand. She played with the trigger. “I had a gun, before. But I ran out of ammo,” she murmured.

Villanelle’s jowls seemed to salivate as she smirked. “What, shooting rabbits?”

“No,” Eve said, harsher than she had intended for it to be. The sudden silence between them was cold and she looked away, a deep crimson fighting its way up her neck. 

The blonde watched her. “How do I know these men are not working with you? Or for you, Eve?”

“I don’t work well with others. You know that by now, I think,” Eve laughed weakly. She glanced sideways and jolted lightly, surprised by Villanelle having shifted closer. 

She felt the huff of what would be Villanelle’s response and her eyes filtered close when lips met hers, plump and soft. She wanted to move, to wrap herself around the blonde but Villanelle stayed still, seemingly simply enjoying the moment as she hummed off-tune and Eve willed her heart to still too, letting out sighs she didn’t know had been caught in her throat. 

Villanelle broke away and rested her forehead against Eve’s. “You taste nice,” she said softly, and pressed another kiss to the corner of Eve’s lips. “I will activate the fire alarm, and then let these smoke bombs do their jobs. The four up there will be smart enough to know we are the source of this sudden incident, but stupid enough to investigate.” She tapped the nail gun with a fingernail. “Use this to keep yourself safe, okay? They will not dare use firearms if they have some, not in the fog. They could hit each other, or themselves.”

“What about you?”

“What _about_ me?”

“You don’t have any weapons.”

Villanelle grinned wide. “I do not need them.” She held a gas mask out. 

Eve took it gingerly. “You’ll never cease to amaze me.”

“Why is that?”

“They could easily overtake us, but they won’t. Just because they’re scared of you.” Eve shied away from Villanelle’s stare. “I wonder what I missed about you, back when I chased you. Why was I never scared of you?”

“I have already told you, Eve. It is because we are the same. I know you do not believe me, but-” The assassin shrugged and pressed her gas mask to her face and strapped it behind her head, tightening it until it fit snugly. 

The smoke cannisters hissed as they spat out their foggy poison and Eve struggled for a moment to breathe in the mask. It felt like she was swimming as a child again in the community center pool, mouth full of chlorine as she strangled herself to get the scuba mask to work and water gurgling through the tube and into her lungs. She chased shadows through the clouds. 

Villanelle reached over and pulled the fire alarm. 

The white overhead lights went out and the backup generator kicked on with a deep-seated whirr down the hallway. Her ears rung; the alarm pierced straight into her vertebrae and the lights became strobe pulsing red. Dark inky blackness to murder blood red and back to the depths of the midnight zone in split second intervals. Villanelle turned to face her and Eve knew she was grinning behind her gas mask, and when she moved it was in stop-motion. 

She disappeared when the lights turned off and Eve tried to time her blinks so she wouldn’t miss her in the smoke. They stood together in the dark, otherwise cold and stiff. 

Villanelle’s voice was warped. “They might be wearing protective gear. Aim for the neck, the hands, and below the knees. Incapacitate them, I do the rest. Do not do anything stupid, and run if you have to, or want to.” In snapshots her fingers flirted with Eve’s cheekbone. “Your last breath is mine, no one else’s.” She narrowed her eyes. “Are you sure you want this?”

Eve watched her, eyes black, invisible between reds, and finally nodded.

The first man was stepping down the staircase a hundred feet off; Eve could feel him through the floor metal sheets. Villanelle had felt him too and she was advancing through the fog dissipating up the higher levels purposefully.

He was hunching through the doorway, making motions over his shoulder and Eve took a moment to plant her feet on the floor, to redistribute her weight. She raised her arms, aimed for the man’s neck as he turned, eyes wide as he caught sight of Villanelle striding towards him at breakneck speed in between two flashes of red light. 

The nail gun spat out its venom. 

There were elongated moans of absolute pain and then Villanelle was on the man, knife flashing in her left hand and slicing up and down and glinting in the dark, blood sputtering in several streams. The second agent was coming down the stairs and Eve shot again, getting the side of the knee. 

Villanelle scrambled to him and Eve could only think of the ghosts and demons her mother had told her about when she was younger, slithering along the floor with blood dripping down their long and wet hair. Villanelle slit his throat and Eve thought she could hear her laugh to herself but wasn’t sure it wasn’t her own throat. The assassin kept slicing and slicing and they were both dead but the blonde didn’t care, obviously taking her frustration out on the corpses in between flashes of black. They weren’t supposed to kill but Eve couldn’t find her voice. 

Villanelle slinked back behind the corner, dragging the bodies with her and out of the stairwell, both her and the Korean woman breathing heavily. They shared a quick glance and Villanelle was grinning again behind her gas mask, as if completely mad. The nail gun trembled in Eve’s hands but she smiled back. The girl blinked, lips frozen in that usual rictus but her eyes blank. 

Always blank when she was killing. 

Ghost or demon, Eve still wondered.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Next week, more action!  
I have an instagram with the same handle, I'm too dumb for twitter mobile 
> 
> ¯\\_(ツ)_/¯


	15. Wasn't Too Much Fun at All

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you all so much for the love!!

She could feel fingers in her hair, parting strands and braiding them one-handedly and expertly, tugging lightly before starting over again. Her eyes stayed shut, she wanted to revel in the feeling of warmth and skin against her ear, under her cheek. It smelled of cedar and lavender and she breathed in deeply, shifting lightly. The movements stilled and she frowned, heart wrenching at the feeling of being upset so quickly after having woken up. The fingers began moving again, a little harsher this time but not so much as to hurt. Eve let herself be swallowed by the feeling.

“You are awake.”

Eve sighed softly, caught at her own game and she opened her eyes, fighting the sun low in the sky. “Yea.”

“Unfortunately?”

“Yea.”

Villanelle laughed lightly, nails grazing at the outside of Eve’s ear. “I would say it is fortunate, because you are quite heavy, and my arm fell asleep a long time ago.”

The ex-agent groaned and she took a moment before sitting up, palm against her aching neck. It cracked when she angled her head just so, a sick crunching noise that reminded her of bones colliding against one another. Next to her, Villanelle was stretching her remaining fingers, watching them with wide eyes. 

Eve remembered falling asleep in the back seat of the Peugeot, she remembered watching the city turn into highways flooded by fields of wheat and colza from the passenger seat. Hours and hours of it. 

She remembered stashing the bodies with the girl in various closets of that ferry’s hallway, in the engine room, all in the cover of darkness and bloodshot moons. Eve had kept look-out while the assassin had mopped up the blood with old rags that reminded the Korean woman of her sweaters back in London. The smoke had dissipated easily and they had stood together on the deck with the other passengers, waiting like good friends would for the Captain to come on the line to explain that the emergency was, after all, just faulty wiring. From there it had been a case of staying low until they docked. 

Villanelle drove like she killed: single-mindedly and with her eyes pressed forward. Eve had watched her more than the fields, black gaze hard on the girl’s slim profile. Blood still stained her high cheekbones. Villanelle never turned to look at her, never broke the stare she had with the black macadam turned gray and back to black. Never looked into the rear or sideview mirrors. 

She didn’t remember Villanelle climbing into the back seat with her, didn’t remember letting herself get close to the girl who smelled of copper and rot and not-so sterile bandages. 

The windows were slowly steaming up and Eve used her sleeve to wipe the condensation off the glass, peering outside and fighting the blush rising quickly beneath her eyelids. The surface was cold. “Where are we?”

Villanelle shifted besides her. “A field.”

Eve grunted back, staring into tall grasses. “I could have guessed.”

“We are a hundred yards off the road. Hidden. There are some trees for extra camouflage.”

The Korean woman glanced back over her shoulder. “They really trained you for every situation, didn’t they? The Twelve?”

Villanelle nodded. “Yes.”

Eve sighed; she knew she wouldn’t get anything else out of the girl. “So, Ukraine.”

Villanelle’s eyes narrowed and Eve could see her jaw clenching under her skin. “Ukraine.”

“You don’t like Ukraine.”

“No.”

“Okay,” Eve breathed. She thought of her own mother and how she buried her father. “At least it’s not Mother Russia, right?” she joked weakly. 

The blonde’s leg was hitting the seat in front of her like a beat, hard and loud. “Everything is Mother Russia,” Villanelle murmured. 

Eve laughed, a bark that echoed in the small car and the assassin’s head whipped around. She opened her mouth to retort but was cut off by a sharp grunt from behind them both. The sound of a thud against hard metal. 

The Korean woman narrowed her eyes. “What was that?” 

“It is what you wished for.”

“What?”

“You wanted questions and their answers, no?” Villanelle looked to her, suddenly and seemingly wounded. “Did you think I was unable to stop myself once I had started? That I had killed them all and forgot everything that had been said between us because I am just another psychopath? A shark that smelt blood?”

“No. I just, I didn’t notice you-“

“I was properly trained for all types of situations.”

“Right.” Eve placated her, then paused. “So, there’s a guy in our trunk.”

“Yes.”

“Okay.” Another pause. “Kind of dead or almost very dead?”

Villanelle sniffed lightly and glanced back over her shoulder. “It depends.”

“On?”

“On his will to live.”

The laugh that bubbled out of Eve was involuntary. She sighed from deep in her belly. “Okay, well. Let’s go, then.”

The sun hit her like a blanket would; a sudden feeling of warmth on her clammy skin and she took a moment to tilt her head up and soak the light in. Villanelle stretched next to her, reached for the sky with her fingers curled together tight and bent over to touch her toes. Eve wanted to do the same but her body would never let her so she turned away instead. There was no reason to embarrass herself. They rounded the car together and the assassin popped the trunk. 

The man inside let out a short scream from around his rag, voice hoarse and feet hitting the side of the car. He switched between screwing his eyes shut against the sudden blinding light and watching the women with frantic, wide eyes. His screaming was continued though. 

“He is alive,” Villanelle said.

Eve grunted back. “How far are we from civilization?” The blonde shrugged and Eve reached down and ripped the gag off. 

“_What the fuck-!_”

Villanelle’s nose scrunched. “He is a squealer.”

He continued to wriggle and scream and Eve slapped him across the face soundly. He stared, shocked. 

“We ask questions, you answer them, and we might let you go. Understood?” Eve nodded back at him. “You obviously know who we are; who are you?”

The man licked his drying and cracked lips. “Andrew Johnson.”

“Fancy.” Villanelle sneered. 

Eve ignored her. “And who do you work for, Andrew Johnson?” 

“Please, I have children, I have-“ The second slap made his ears ring and he took a moment to swallow. “We’re mercenaries. We’re not government.”

The blonde leaned in, inches away from his face. “Then who hired you?”

“MI6,” he stammered. “Someone at MI6. Project Dokkaebi. I don’t know anything-”

The trunk slammed shut and Villanelle watched Eve stomp away in a fury. She knocked on the top of the car. “Sorry, buddy,” she crowed in an American accent. “Try again later.” She snaked her hands into her blouse pockets and followed after the Korean woman through the brambles. 

Eve stopped and tilted her head up towards the sky and _screamed_. 

From deep in her belly and out through a lie-scorched throat. 

It rung out through the clearing, echoed through the field around them and crows took off out of a nearby tree, joining in with their own cacophony.

She knew Carolyn didn’t trust her, she barely trusted herself, but this was too much. If shipping her off to live or die in a hospital was one thing, if encircling her and babying her was another,

assuming she needed the help was downright offensive. 

Hadn’t she been the reborn lone wolf? Wasn’t she the one who’d found their prey first, and wasn’t she the only one who could, time after time, find the assassin? Carolyn needed _her_ and instead of trusting her just for once, just for one goddamn time, the pack watched her like hawks. And if she was honest with herself, she didn’t even care to know if they had been sent just to watch her or slaughter them. She bent in two, she wanted to vomit. She heaved lightly, tears framed the edges of her vision. This was her fight, her kill. Her revenge. 

Everything was Carolyn’s fault. 

Her hand was pulled away from her thigh and something heavy found its way against her palm. She glanced sideways and up into Villanelle’s stony gaze. The girl’s hand. 

“Come, Eve,” Villanelle said. 

She let herself be pulled along and back to the man in the trunk. Villanelle pulled the latch open and they stared at the agent once more.

“Please,” he whimpered. “Please, I just want to go home.”

“Do you know who we are? By name?” the assassin asked. She was almost jovial. 

“Y-yes.”

“Then no can-do, bucko,” Villanelle quipped. She crossed her arms and glanced at Eve, smiling. The Korean woman wasn’t about to humor her, and she kept her black gaze forward. The girl frowned lightly and turned back to the man. “You know what happens next, right?”

“Please.”

“You get to die,” she sighed off-handedly. She reached into her jacket pocket and pulled out the nail gun, flicked the trigger, and without breaking gaze with the officer; thrust it towards Eve. “But I only have three fingers, and cannot aim properly. Eve?”

The woman stared, unable to keep the surprise from rushing up her face and settling deep into her jaw. She licked her dry lips. “You work for Carolyn Martens?” A last, frantic nod. She palmed the gun. “How many nails do we have left, Villanelle?”

A hyena’s grin. “Four.”

Before, she would have shook, would have cried hot, stinging tears. Now she felt only black death coating the inside of her lungs; tar that choked her throat as she made a neat square between the man’s eyes. Stylish but effective, and next to her Villanelle let out a light whistle as she leaned in to watch him breathe his last breath. Blood pooled in his eye sockets, trailed down his long nose and Eve wiped at her face. 

She turned when Villanelle reached for the nails and ripped them out with sickening pops. 

“I used a staple gun once, on a rabbit,” the girl said. “I was not as neat as you were just now, though. But the necklace I made out of the staples afterwards was rather cute.” She waited a moment, as if expecting Eve to say something but it didn’t come. She shifted on the balls of her feet. “I am surprised you did it.”

“I’m tired of being treated like a goddamned child.”

Villanelle toed the ground beside the woman, eyeing the turf. “That is very good acting, Eve.”

Eve whirled around angrily. “What the _fuck_ does that mean?”

“Do you want a guess as to why I decided to keep this particular man alive?”

“Please, as if you thought this through-”

Villanelle’s gaze lifted to pin her in place. “I am not an idiot.”

“I never said-“

“In his back pocket, the left one? He has a homing beacon.”

Eve laughed. “What?”

“MI6 has been tracking us, then,” Villanelle said. “They are tracking us right now. I wish you would not lie to me.”

“_Lie_ to you?”

“I know they were with you, Eve. I know you have been working with Carolyn since Rome.”

“How dare you-!” Eve traipsed around Villanelle, anger coursing through to her feet. Her curls flew. “She was pretty fucking mad at me after Rome! You think I’ve been working for her this entire time? Ha!” she yelled. 

The blonde circled too now. “They could not have found us on their own, Eve, I am not as stupid as you would hope that I am.” Her voice rose. “Did you honestly think your little sob story of wanting to spend time with me would work?”

“Villanelle, I did.”

“Bullshit.”

“You’re a fucking murderer, who in their right mind would do this unless it was voluntarily!” 

“He was with you, they were with you, he had a beacon because you are too stupid to know how to hide one without giving it up.” Villanelle walked as she talked, a vulture herself and she stabbed her talon at Eve. “And you know, I am fucking disappointed in you because you could not even do this yourself? You could not even do this without asking for help from your mommy? I thought you would crack in Greece, with that little knife of yours. I let you keep it, I thought you would grow a spine on our little adventure and try _something_ that resembled your original vendetta against me but you are weak. You have always been weak and you always will be.” She thundered towards Eve. “Kill me, Eve, you were given orders! So kill me! Follow orders like you always have while on your little leash that keeps you two steps from the edge, kill me!”

Eve’s backhand was strong, emotional, and her eyes closed as she made contact with Villanelle’s angular jaw. The blonde took it in full, head cracking to the side with a crunch even though Eve knew she could easily have twisted artfully with it. She heaved for breath, watching the heap that was Villanelle with her shoulders down. The girl’s head turned lightly and the bruise was already blooming beneath her cheek, blood pouring out of her split lip and down her chin, teeth stained red. Her hazel green eyes watched Eve. 

The woman pulled her fist back and she let it fly, connecting it again with Villanelle’s flesh. She thought she felt her knuckles break through bone, and suddenly wished they had. This time, the assassin fell to one knee. Eve reached for her hair. She tugged until Villanelle faced upwards and let her fist connect again. This time it was her fingers that gave in, shattering along the girl’s broken nose. She realized she was smiling. And Villanelle let her. 

The girl heaved in the grass, spitting saliva and blood between the blades. Eve thought she saw a tooth. Villanelle laughed lightly as her nose whistled through floating cartilage, her throat full of mucus and red. 

Eve grunted and lifted her foot, placing it against the assassin’s shoulder and pushing her down farther into the mud. She slipped off and aimed for slender ribs but knew she would have to hit harder if she wanted them to give in; they’d been broken and fixed so many times that now they were as tough as metal, ugly and twisted things that resembled a bad plaster job with all their past pains and fractures. She didn’t want to tire herself out: Villanelle wasn’t worth it. 

Was she?

“Eve.”

The woman glanced down, pulled out of her reverie, foot still firmly planted next to the girl’s armpit. She quirked an eyebrow and Villanelle breathed hard against her shin. She moved to pull away slightly but the assassin grabbed the back of her heel with a firm grasp and held her close, shifting her other arm to grasp at the toes of her boot too. 

“Eve,” she muttered again. 

“What?” Eve murmured back. Her knuckles itched to flow through blonde locks and pull, pull, pull. 

Villanelle grinned and it froze Eve’s blood in her veins. “You never were that smart.”

She was going to ask what she meant, opened her mouth to form the words, but Villanelle acted first. 

The blonde tugged the woman’s foot closer and snaked her fingers into the side of the boot, tugging until she found the knife hidden there. Eve couldn’t react fast enough; she watched in what felt like slow-motion. 

The blade spun in Villanelle’s hand, from a light grasp in between slender fingers to a white-knuckled grip with her thumb resting on the edge of the small guard. And then the assassin’s arm was a blur, up over her head and coming down and Eve-

Eve was right in the way.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Whatever happened to Eve, me dothst wonderstststststsh *spittles*
> 
> Next chapter sometime next week!


	16. Take my Tears and that's Not Nearly All

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Warning, this chapter contains and describes gore, so watch out if you're squeamish!

The back of her heel had been sliced through neatly, her Achilles tendon cut in half and snapped into two neat sides, leaving her foot to hang only by sleek veins, with broken white bone showing and open to the elements. Glinting in the cold sunlight. 

As much as she tried, no thought was fully forming in Eve’s mind as she lay whimpering and bleeding in the grass. Besides her, Villanelle cackled to herself, holding her belly where her skin had split again where a knife had gone in once, her swollen face upturned to the sun. Eve struggled to hold her head up, struggled to look down and examine herself through the haze and agony that coursed through her frozen and frayed nerves. She sat up as best as she could; elbows first, palms of her hands second. Her black eyes shifted through the blood and mud and her fingers pulled grass out at their roots against the pain. 

“Shut up,” she spat at the blonde and sat back momentarily, spent. Villanelle only laughed harder. “Shut up!” She refocused again, breathing out of rhythm. 

Villanelle stood slowly by the heap that Eve had become and she stepped over the woman, deliberately stabbing the toe of her boot into the end of the woman’s leg. The foot flopped loosely and Eve began to yell again, her shriek a dark music to both their ears. The assassin continued to laugh lightly, blood pouring out of her mouth and saliva sticking to her chin and the front of her jacket. She grunted as she stepped over Eve, eyes crossed involuntarily from the hits she’d received and she stumbled in a zig-zag pattern to the car. 

Unceremoniously, she pulled the mercenary’s body out of the trunk and dumped it near Eve, part of his legs draped over hers as Villanelle fought not to fall over with the weight of him. Eve cried out between two whimpers, sobbing openly and unable to calm herself long enough to string two words together, the pain becoming too much. She phased in and out of consciousness.

Villanelle knelt down by her side and cooed at her, pushing back stray curls from Eve’s forehead, heavily beaded with sweat. She reached over the woman’s body to fish around the corpse’s pockets, picking out the homing beacon triumphantly. Bloody and swollen, she bent down to kiss Eve’s cheek before placing the device on her chest, patting it twice, patted her cheek too. Her legs weren’t so sure of themselves when she stood to make her way back to the car. Her laughter had trailed off long ago. 

Behind the wheel, she rolled the window down but kept her gaze forward. In the sideview mirror, her left eye had swollen shut. “Sorry, baby.”

It was ironic and Eve was a banshee as Villanelle drove away, tires scraping in the mud momentarily as the downed woman screamed wishes of death upon her. 

When Eve’s eyes opened again, she found that she was freezing. She’d filtered in and out of consciousness all afternoon and the sunset; but now, as the owls far in the trees hooted their nightly call, she shivered and woke fully. Numb from the waist down and burning up otherwise. She thought it had rained: her too-light clothes were soaked and she was shivering violently, her teeth chattering so hard she could barely think. She was crying again, had she stopped at all? 

She began to shift and she grunted and whined, fingers grasping at the mercenary’s cold and very dead body next to hers for anything that resembled grounding. 

Eve Polastri sat up, took one good, long look at her foot, and began to sob violently. 

Villanelle, leaving the scene, had kicked her foot away hard enough that it stuck out at an awkward angle, its front closer to her shin than it should ever be. The assassin had been so quick and precise with her cut, and yet she’d somehow sliced the knife straight through the tendon and two bones, cracking her cartilage and separating everything in between. Precise. At the time Eve hadn’t heard the crack but now she saw it. She wondered if a part of the blade had broken off in her, if she was more metal than she had been before. If only she’d kept the bullet in her side, too. 

She fell back against the grass. Once upon a time the pain shooting up her back would have made her eyes roll back in their sockets and made her curse her age and her genetics but now, it was almost a blessing to think of that dull pain instead of whatever was happening below her belt. 

Her eyes slid to the side and she watched the corpse, scrutinized the wounds she had left in his head. 

“I’m sorry,” she murmured. “I’m so sorry.” She closed her own eyes, screwed them shut until stars exploded behind her eyelids. Her voice was hoarse. “I don’t know why I thought anything would be different.” The corpse didn’t reply, eyes blank and blue. “Probably massive blood loss, huh.” She let out a deep sigh. “I apologize for what I’m about to do.”

He said nothing.

She grunted and pushed him off as best as she could so that she could roll over onto her stomach, but quickly found that she couldn’t properly. She ended on her side, forbidden leg dead in the grass and the other with its knee up and toes pushing as best as she could. The constant yowls from her throat she ignored, it would be too much to take time to try and stop herself because by god, she had the right to fucking hurt. 

And she hated her life.

In her haze she ripped at the body’s shirt and made what she thought could almost be a tourniquet and tied it tight around her shin, below her knee. In the back of her mind she knew it wasn’t worth anything; she’d stopped bleeding a while back. Her ankle was caked in bits of muscles and sinew and large chunks of clotted blood. She reached down and touched the surface of it all with two trembling fingers. She couldn’t even feel it past a certain paralyzing burn. It was hot to the touch; it felt like lava, and she croaked out a sigh that resounded in the clearing.

Eve spied the homing beacon on the corpse’s body, tucked halfway in a breast pocket, and she reached for it. Villanelle’s latest gift. Poisoned, as with all of them. Her broken fingernails tapped the black box, scratched at it, and she leaned into it. “Are you a walkie?” she murmured. 

Her leg throbbed.

She fell back against the grass.

By day two, she was starving.

It occurred to her, as she lay on her stomach because laying on her back made her eyes water and her face dry out too quickly, that neither her nor Villanelle had had time to eat since before they’d boarded the ferry. She could see the girl now, handicapped hand pointing at a fast food placard and bruised face smiling into her burger. Eve so wished the blonde had flipped the car through blurred vision. Her cramped stomach buzzed at the idea, her broken knuckles tingled thinking of the girl’s face under them. 

Her leg had given up feeling like anything other than a tree log by the next morning and she, weak and dazed, dared to sit up on her knees. She began to pull herself across the field with the one leg up doing all the work to drag her dead limb behind, homing beacon clutched to her chest and reason for finally moving being the mercenary’s decomposing body. His rotting flesh and hers combined had become too much. She hadn’t examined herself but the smell and the pus building and building and building was enough to tell her something was very wrong. 

In the grand scheme of things, it was the least of her worries.

Her fingers were cold and stiff around the beacon but she wouldn’t let it go. She knew it was Carolyn at the other end of it, knew that whatever happened she was in the worst trouble she’d ever been in. 

But Villanelle she’d trusted, and she’d been let down.

Carolyn, she wondered why she had tried trusting her one last time. 

And obviously the feeling had been mutual. 

She waited in the falling darknesses, in the rising suns, lips and endings turning blue and her mind more a maze than ever before; new hallways and vaulted dead ends being constructed every waking moment. Twice as fast when she passed out from exhaustion.

It turned out that worms didn’t taste as bad as she would have thought. 

When it drizzled she let them pool around her as they crawled up from beneath the earth into her waiting hands, but she let them dry out in the sun first. She was starving but not desperate enough yet to eat them straight from the puddle, wet and with a choking feeling. They died on her chest and she swallowed them whole and dry. 

It curbed something within her.

Dignity, mostly.

OOOoooOOO

Eve blinked in the harsh sunlight, groggy and hazed and she watched the spots of darkness in her vision turn into one opaque mass that came closer and closer to her, turning into a shape she knew. She coughed; phlegm and bits of worms and dirt, and spoke. “Took you long enough.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thoughts???  
A smaller chapter, waiting for what's to come! I think there should be three? chapters left?
> 
> Also, I fudging love Legos, and I'm pretty good at creating sets and instructions on Stud.io BrickLink; I've opened up an etsy shop for some Pokémons BUT! If any of you would like something? I'd be happy to try it! Killing Eve or whatever you'd like :)
> 
> Love you guys!


	17. Restore Life the Way it Should Be

“Kiev, Eve. You are in Kiev.”

“Gross.”

Carolyn’s eyebrows raised and fell back. She hummed. “Quite.”

Eve’s elder sniffed, gaze now turned to the window facing a darkened and cloudy sky, but Eve looked elsewhere. She fought to sit up against her slim pillows that were doubled to fashion a proper one, but she hissed out violently and quickly sat up, craning her neck and moving her arms in odd angles to look at her elbows. Grass stained and bloody, they had been bandaged quickly and almost ineffectively. The rest of her was much the same, same clothes now tattered by surgical scissors to get to problem areas and dirt and turf stuck in nooks and crannies. 

Her head suddenly swam and she sat farther forward; whatever drugs were being pumped into her from the IV next to her head (she would have sworn she could hear it drip, drip, drip) were making her numb. Blurred and blackened edges were breaking away and reconstructing themselves in her field of vision. 

She moved the fingers of her right hand, then her left, cracked her knuckles, rubbed at her bandaged elbows. Finally she breathed out harshly, sucked in through her nose until her lungs were too full and she felt dizzy again, and she dared to look down her body.

The jeans on her leg had been ripped up to her hip bone and she sobbed out.

In relief.

Her leg was whole. 

Wrapped in a shit-ton of bandage and gauze and tape and a cast, but whole. 

She prodded at it, found that it hurt, and continued to cry. Days ago she would have given anything to feel something again and here she was, feeling all the pain and agony that her almost severed limb could give her. A giggle escaped out of her mouth and she let her head fall into her hands and her fingers dug through grime and oil. 

“Oh, Eve,” Carolyn began. She turned away from the window and waited for the Korean woman’s laughter to die out; almost respectfully. As if looking after her nails. “I almost forgot.” Eve looked up. “I ordered reuben on rye. Please don’t find it a terrible joke.” She motioned to Eve’s leg with her chin. “Considering the situation. But I was feeling quite peckish.”

“Extra swish cheese?”

Carolyn shrugged, unfazed. “Naturally.”

Eve fell back into her hospital bed, letting out a long sigh. “I guess I should thank you.”

“We both know you’re not so sentimental, Eve, and I would hope by now that you would know me better too.”

“Noted.”

“What happened?”

Eve stared.

Carolyn let a hint of a smile grace her lips. “What didn’t?” she guessed. “I must say it was brilliant of you to stay with the homing beacon. I hardly think we would have found you otherwise.”

“How long have I been here? How long was I out there?”

Her elder rapped her knuckles on the cast on her leg and she winced at the sudden and sharp pain running up her. “You aren’t asking the questions here, I am.” Eve nodded. Carolyn rubbed the pads of her fingertips together. Dirt. “Maybe not today though, hmm?”

OOOoooOOO

It was nine days before she saw Carolyn again. Nine days of constant, cycling states of anxiety, with panic shifting through the in-betweens of her veins and the morphine drip; back and forth and sloshing around in her brain. It, at least, gave the hospital food something resembling taste. And it, at least, gave her something to do: swim in that gorgeous jelly-like dreaming of hers. 

Because the nurses, through no fault of their own, didn’t speak English. She wished now she’d taken to learning Russian after being hired by the Russian affairs bureau team, but when she’d been hired she hadn’t thought it could ever get this far; stuck behind the iron curtain with a useless leg and an already broken heart shattered into pieces. And goddamn unable to speak Russian. 

Seeing Carolyn was almost a breath of fresh air after hours and hours of Slavic dubbed reruns of CSI episodes. Not that she minded the television, but they were plot arcs she’d already seen several times. All that had been missing was the glass of wine to make her feel at home again.

Her elder pulled a chair up to her bedside and threw her outer coat around its back gracefully. Leg crossing over the other and pulling on the lapels of her blazer to straighten it out, Carolyn’s gaze was sword sharp. “Are you well?”

“I just sucked some morphine in,” Eve joked. “So just fine.”

“Good.”

The ex-agent’s head turned quickly, thoughts sloshing again in between her ears but Carolyn didn’t bat an eyelid, peering at her nails as a mousey looking woman wormed her way into the hospital room and shut them in again. The bag strapped precariously about her back was bigger than even what Eve’s purse had ever been. 

Eve gazed over the scene wearily. “What’s all this for?”

“This is Morgan. Obviously, a report needs to be finalized.”

“Obviously.” She blinked. “What, now? Like, right now?”

Her elder’s eyebrow quirked. “Do you have somewhere else to be?”

“And here I thought you might be here to actually check on me.” Heavy handed, she flung her arm out to motion the girl over. Petite and skinny, she filed herself away into the corner chair behind Carolyn. Eve watched her critically. “I might need some more morphine, actually.” 

“We need your testimonial to be unfiltered.”

“Can I get some water?”

Carolyn handed her a bottle from the nightstand, rolled too far away from Eve’s side. “Be honest in your answers.”

“Sure, yea. Uh, is that a typewriter?”

The assistant froze in the middle of pulling out the heavy device from her bag, obviously taken by surprise. Carolyn waved her on, her sigh clipped in half. “Considering our current predicament, we can’t afford being hacked into. Wouldn’t you agree?”

“Uh.” Eve scratched at her hair with broken nails. “True.”

Carolyn’s mask hardened again, from benevolent mother to seasoned warlord it seemed. “You weren’t able to do what I asked you to do.”

“You want to start with the end?”

“I asked one thing of you.”

“You’ve asked a shit ton of things from me,” Eve countered. “This was just your latest task of the damned.”

“You seemed pretty cozy with the devil herself, Eve, even before I asked you to complete your final mission. Why is that?”

“Pass.”

Carolyn smiled. “Why find her, then? Leave the hospital we’d placed you in after your incident in Rome?”

The Korean woman laughed bitterly. “Me finding her was your plan all along though, wasn’t it? I found Villanelle because you knew I would and you knew I could because I’m an obsessed and sadistic piece of shit?” She leaned forward, stomach aching. “Thanks for that, by the way. I loved waking up in an unknown place with no one to tell me fucking _anything_.”

“You do your best work when you’ve got no strings attached.”

“No strings attached?” Eve echoed, fury burning the inside of her throat. 

Carolyn’s lip quivered higher. “Pass.” She settled herself again in the chair. A manila folder appeared into her hands and she filtered through the pages with as blank an expression as she could, Eve watching her with labored breath. The pain in her leg felt renewed again. “From Strasbourg, then, the top of the cathedral.”

Eve could smell the Mediterranean air again. She wished she’d drowned there on that beach. “Slovakia, then Croatia. Greece. She wanted to sightsee,” she murmured. “I wanted to push her off a cliff, there were so many of them, but she never let me behind her. I was never allowed to be the last up the stairs, or into a room. She always watched my back. More than hers, I think. Even when we slept.”

The assistant typed frantically. 

Eve rubbed at the bridge of her nose and she drank from the water bottle. “Then, uh, a lot of traveling. She gets bored easily, so we never stayed too long in one place. Like plague-ridden rats. From bus to bus to ship.”

“And there weren’t any opportunities during these trips?”

_Yes_. “No.”

“How did you find yourself on that ferry, Eve?”

“Straight to the meat of it, huh?” the woman let out a hollow laugh. “We got to Bulgaria on one of those ersatz Greyhounds, you know those ones? Anyway, she didn’t want to go back to Romania. There’s probably a big ol’ target on my back over there, since I-“ Eve paused. “I mean, there was some property damage done. When I found her, I mean. Uh, when she ran. A broken window and stuff.” 

Carolyn continued to watch her. 

The ex-agent ruffled her hair. “So uh, Bulgaria, to Ukraine, of all places. By boat. And that’s when she told me we were being followed.”

“By the four agents later found-“

“Yes.” Eve glanced at the windows. She wanted to jump out, tear her throat out with the glass. “At first, I won’t lie, I wasn’t sure who they were working for, if they wanted me dead, or her, or the both of us.”

“Three bodies were found stuffed inside a closet, Eve, with knife and nail gun wounds. A bleach trail found by our forensics team led to where they died. Can you confirm where they died?”

“A staircase, on the lowest floor.” Eve blinked. “She cleaned with bleach?”

“How was she able to lure them there?”

“She,” the Korean woman paused, thoughts scrambled. “I was in our room, the room she got us, and I heard the fire alarm go off. She came back after it had stopped, covered in blood.”

Carolyn read her files, and after a long moment of tense silence, spoke. “There were two sets of prints in said bleach pool.” She turned the page. “What next?”

“We landed in Odessa, and she drove us to where you found me. We slept there and in the morning she showed me she had stuck the last agent, still alive, in the trunk.”

“Still alive?”

“Yes.”

“The team was able to conclude he died in that trunk and was then dumped in that field.” Another page flip. “The nail gun was used again, to place four nails into the victim’s forehead. They perforated the cranium and the frontal lobes. Painful and not immediate.” She looked up. “Villanelle murdered this agent too, then?”

_No_. Eve nodded slowly. “She wanted to make a point. She was angry that you’d sent these men after us and she thought I was in on it, and she took it out on me.”

Carolyn’s eyebrows raised. “The bruising on your hands, self-defense?”

“This is your fault,” Eve murmured. “If you hadn’t sent those men after us, if you’d trusted me-“

“I can’t trust you,” Carolyn said sharply. “Evidently.”

“If you’d given me some more time-!”

“You’d have kept running. With Villanelle.” The woman shifted her weight in the chair. “I understand now that I applied too much pressure to you, and always have. I’m afraid you were never cut out for this.”

Eve’s head snapped up. “Yes, I was,” she snarled. “It’s why you hired me and kept hiring me.”

“I asked one last thing of you, Eve, so that you could finally clear your name, your record, so that you could get away from this, from her. You could have done your task quickly and efficiently a long time ago. Time and time again you had your opportunities, but you always go back to her.” She sat forward. “Did I hire you, Eve? Wasn’t this an obsession, before we had even met?”

“What are you-“

Carolyn leaned back again. “Do I even exist, Eve?”

Eve breathed shallowly. “So that’s it? You don’t exist and neither do I?”

“Oh, you do. You are a divorced, single woman living alone in a rented flat with no friends, and soon it'll be said on the news that you were the victim of a pretty nasty attempted robbery. How you’ve been made into a victim is up to debate still,” the woman replied. “As you can imagine, suicide has already been suggested.” 

Eve stared ahead at the wall. “Let me guess, assisted suicide?”

“Unless you’ll bite the bullet yourself?”

“I didn’t survive Villanelle to off myself,” she bit back.

“I thought so,” Carolyn hummed. “Any idea where she is now?”

“I need morphine.”

Her elder nodded tightly and waved her hand at her assistant, who begrudgingly set her typewriter down where she’d been sitting before slipping out of the room and entombing them again.

Eve settled lower in her bed, flimsy comforter rushing up her chest. “I don’t know where she is.”

“Any idea of where she could be going?”

“She was headed towards Russian territory. She wouldn’t go there normally, right? But she knows that we know that she wouldn’t go there, so maybe she actually went.”

“That’s very informative.”

“You didn’t think I’d make it easy on you, did you?”

“Never. Do you know of any weapons she could have on her?”

The door slid open and Eve shrugged lamely. “My knife, unless she’s keeping it as a souvenir. Otherwise I’m sure the car is packed full. She stole it, did I mention that?”

“The car?”

“And the knife. But I stole it too,” Eve said softly. “So is that still stealing? Stealing a stolen item?”

Carolyn’s shoulders rose and fell. “Those are things that are a bit below my level of expertise, Eve.”

“Right, not a regular cop.” The girl in the corner, hunched over, picked up the typewriter again; it didn’t seem as heavy as it had before. Eve watched her carefully. “She didn’t catch all that.”

Carolyn did a half-hearted half turn for show, cold eyes on the files in her lap still. “That’s fine, Villanelle’s current whereabouts aren’t part of the report.”

“Isn’t it important?”

“This is your file, not hers. We don't have enough time to open her can of worms. ”

Eve let herself laugh but she winced as her leg jiggled in its sling, hanging in the air inches from the bed. She sighed tightly and shifted to sit up. “Can I have that morphine now? This fucking hurts.”

“That’s fine. Morgan?”

“Coming right up.”

Eve would never have thought that a head concaving in on itself, struck by such a blunt object as a typewriter, would make the noise it did. A deep thunking noise that vibrated, and it was all punctuated by the device’s bell in a sick combination that made Eve want to laugh. 

Carolyn crumpled to the floor with the first strike, breathing in a broken rhythm and extending her hand out to the heavens and Eve, but Villanelle lifted the typewriter over her head again and let it fall heavily. Over, and over, and over again. A dark and beating drum that came up every time swashed in more and more blood and brains. Bits of skull. Carolyn was dead but Villanelle was kneeling besides her and still drumming her into a pulp, laughing into the sunset. 

When her head lifted, it was to grin at Eve, face covered in red and white smile breaking the reverie of a child with strawberry jam. Eve wanted to lick it off her cheeks. 

Instead, she reached forward and over the side of her bed to push matted hair away from Villanelle’s forehead. In her peripheral vision and through the open door, she spied Morgan’s body splayed on the floor, blood pooling under her from a gash in her neck. 

Villanelle blocked her view when she sat up, filling Eve’s vision with bright eyes and cherry red lips and she pressed a kiss to Eve’s lips that tasted like Carolyn rotting beneath them. 

“Hi,” Villanelle said.

“_Get off me_-“

The blonde grinned and sat up, feet slipping in the blood beneath her and she laughed lightly as she held onto the bed momentarily for balance. She pulled on the triangular sling, swung it to and fro. “Oh, look, Eve, you still have your leg.”

Eve turned her head to look at the girl, dark eyes wide. “You wanted me to lose it.” Villanelle smiled cheekily at her, and Eve took just long enough to wonder if it was possible to simulate blushes in pale ears, if it was even possible to fake something like that. 

“Fingers for a leg, Eve! And you did not lose your leg! So it is okay?” 

“You psychopath.” She spared a glance at Carolyn’s remains, stomach turning at the sight that was tomato sauce mince as her thoughts began to clear, as her heartbeat began to slow. “Oh my god, you murdered Carolyn,” she murmured. “Oh my god.” 

Villanelle shrugged loosely and leaned forward to brush her lips against Eve’s again. Her breath was hot. “I will make this up to you, I promise.” Eve’s neck strained as she pulled away as far as she could. The blonde began to pout and sat heavily on the bed, ignoring the other’s pained hiss. The girl’s face was tender and raised, obviously still healing from their previous meeting. “You do not look surprised to see me.”

“You just murdered Carolyn!”

“You did not like her.”

“You don’t just murder people you don’t like!”

Villanelle smiled. “Are you sure, Eve?”

“Get off my sheets, get out of my room, get out of my life-!” Her voice was shrill, yelling louder and louder. She began to sat up but a thunderous clap of pain rushed through her spine, throwing her back against her pillow. “Fuck!”

“Calm down, Eve.” Villanelle frowned. “You are in pain, you cannot wriggle around like that.”

The ex-agent raised her fist and it fell against the younger woman’s chest. “Why the fuck do you care-!” She hit her again with her other hand, and the next. 

Villanelle watched her carefully, letting her get another few hits in, but finally she grabbed Eve by her forearms and held her down in the bed. “She was going to murder you, Eve, and then she was going to murder me.”

“I’m pretty sure you and I deserve to be fucking-“

“Stop swearing, and stop fighting me,” the girl said. “I came to get you. I came to cut your little puppet strings.” She pulled Eve up and forced her to lean over the bed, face turned towards the corpse. “There they are. This is what you wanted.”

Eve’s eyes widened and she began to whine, throat constricting as she started hyperventilating. “Oh my god, oh my god, what are we going to do?” She fought a retch. “Help! Help me! _I’m being murdered_!”

Villanelle’s eyes rolled into the back of her head momentarily and she pulled Eve back up firmly. She shook her. “Shut up, shut up!” 

“Help me-!”

“There is no one else here, Eve! It is like you do not trust me!”

Eve was crazed. “How did you find me?”

“Do you know many people here in Ukraine who eat-“ Villanelle’s nose crinkled. “Reuben sandwiches?”

“Help-!“

Eve’s eyes slammed shut as Villanelle shook her again. “Stop yelling, Eve, or I will hit you.”

“What do you want from me!” the Korean woman screamed.

“I want what you want, Eve! God!”

“What?” Breathing heavily, they stared each other down as the ground beneath them continued to slicken. Eve swallowed, dry mouth agape. “Why?”

Villanelle’s brows furrowed. “Why?” she echoed.

Eve pushed her away again. “No, no, no. You can’t tell me that, not after all, after all-“ She flung her arms out and gesticulated wildly at her leg, grunting out noises in frustration and anger and utter disbelief. “-this shit!”

“I told you once, before, that this is what you wanted. I can give that to you, if you will let me. I never wanted you to be a mess, or to be scared. I wanted you to be _you_.” The blonde seemed to retreat into herself for a moment, suddenly sulking. “I guess Alaska was just not the way about it.”

“No, it wasn’t.”

“You are hard to please.”

“I never asked you to-“ Eve rushed out a breath and closed her eyes, fingering her brow. “You can’t just do things without asking first.” The blonde glanced up, hazel eyes shining like a child’s, and she moved to be closer. “You don’t understand empathy, so don’t try to act on feelings you don’t know anything about. That you don’t even have,” she corrected.

“I will ignore you insulting me and instead focus on me being right, after all,” the girl said. She kicked off the bed and held her hand out. “Come.”

“What?”

“Eve, come with me.” Eve stared quizzically at her for a moment and finally the blonde huffed and stood. Her body language began to morph slowly; her back straightened and her fingers intertwined behind her back and her voice was slow and smooth like molasses with hints of a stutter. Nervousness wrapped within a girl from Newark. “I think you’d like some help getting outta here, some help starting a new life, ya know? You just have to ask, and we’ll be right on our way.” She motioned around them. “There ain’t nothin’ left here,” she murmured. The Russian accent came back then, harder than before. “Or with her.” 

The Korean woman swallowed thickly, dark gaze shifting between Carolyn’s remains and the assistant’s body in the hallway. She wondered how many other corpses littered the floors, wondered how many were still gasping for their last breaths. Villanelle came into her vision, filled it up again with soft warmth and tenderness so unlike her and Eve watched her toe Carolyn’s pieces out of the way with the end of a designer boot. The morphine making the situation hazy.

"How does that sound, Eve? Running away with me?"

“Get me out of here,” Eve muttered. “And then take me to bed.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> villanelle: *hits carolyn with a typewriter*  
villanelle: VIBE CHECK!!!!!
> 
> In any case two more chapters left in this story! Let me know what you think so far!!!


	18. Everything I Ever Did

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Long awaited for, here's your plot with 'heavy' kisses :*  
It's a little angry, content warning for this chapter!

It was unlike Villanelle to plan her life more than a few hours in advance. And yet, and yet, she’d gone against every fiber of her being to do just so. The girl was huffing now as she pushed Eve along in a wheelchair and every bump made Eve whine out in pain. Villanelle had pulled her leg out of its sling and practically flung the woman over her shoulder in a fireman’s carry, free hand grabbing and stashing all the medication she could into her coat pockets. 

Eve’s head turned at every open door as they wheeled past and she wondered and wondered where everyone could possibly be; if it was Carolyn that had had the building emptied to keep anonymity or if it had been Villanelle. But no alarm rang, no siren flashed, no police cars congregated down below. She opted to keep quiet, unsure of how Villanelle would react if she were to ask anything, flashes of Carolyn’s remains behind her eyelids. 

As if reading her mind, Villanelle spoke low in her ear. “How many pieces would you say she was in?”

Eve blinked and said nothing. And was promptly rewarded with the blonde turning a corner, hitting the wall with the chair’s left front wheel in the process. The pain struck Eve’s side like a truck. The elevator hummed along with the young woman all the way down to the ground floor. 

And Villanelle, in the staff parking lot and between parked ambulances all emptied, threw her head back and began to scream a joyous scream, jumping on the balls of her feet and shrieking. Eve glanced around them furtively with wide eyes and reached out to grab at her sleeve, tugging and tugging and pleading.

“Stop it!”

“Stop?” the girl laughed. “Stop what?”

“_Stop yelling_!” 

Villanelle turned, grin frozen in place, and with emotion gone but smile wide she cocked her hip out. “I am happy, Eve. Am I not allowed to be happy?” She shrugged lamely. 

“Go ahead and imitate whatever fucking emotion you want to, you nutjob,” Eve hissed. “But you could at least stop calling attention to us.” She looked around and whispered. “Are you trying to get us caught?”

“I cannot be caught,” Villanelle said. Her hands landed heavily on Eve’s armrests and she leant forward and Eve watched her from underneath heavy eyebrows. “I have never been caught. Not since my first kill.” Her head tilted. “Did I ever tell you about my first kill?” Her eyebrows wiggled lightly. “It involved a pedophile’s penis and his intestines through a pool filter.”

“Did it really,” Eve asked, thundered voice a harsh whisper. “And here I thought it had something to do with your father?”

Villanelle’s features twisted and Eve prayed silently, gazing up into those fiery eyes.

The girl stood up straight, forced a smile, and dangled a set of keys. “Ever ride in an ambulance driven by an assassin, Eve?”

It was almost peaceful with Eve laid back on a stretcher and the wheelchair tucked away in a corner in the back of the vehicle. She watched the machine by her head beep by its lonesome, attached to nothing and its wires dangling as Villanelle sang along softly to a song on the radio; something in Russian. In between advertisements, Eve could hear her imitating a high-pitched siren like a child, making faces at other drivers when she was passed by. It could have been almost endearing and domestic of them, if they weren’t running preemptively from a double-murder in a stolen ambulance. 

Villanelle didn’t bat an eye when she wheeled Eve into the lobby of the Premier Palace hotel in the center of the capital, leaving the ambulance on the curb and donning a paramedic’s cap that disappeared between the sidewalk and inside the doors. The man at the front desk barely blinked at the disheveled Korean in a full leg cast pushed along by a gorgeous blonde, and Eve wondered what else he had seen and promptly ignored. 

“Президентский номер, пожалуйста,” Villanelle purred. “Бронирование под именем Бэк.” Eve frowned and sunk lower into her coat, thrown over her haphazardly. 

His fingers ran over his keyboard. “На две ночи, дамы?”

“Верный.”

The sigh Eve let out when they entered the five-room suite was a defeated one, and the bellboy made quick work of leaving them alone after a quick tip handed over by Villanelle into his outstretched hand. 

She locked the door behind him. “This is much nicer than the room down the hall, more space, better view.” She shifted. “Would you like a drink? Food?”

“Hospital food was shite,” Eve said.

“I will have something brought up. And it will be much better than train triangle sandwiches or hospital food.” Eve let herself laugh and Villanelle’s face lit up. Giddy, she ran to the next room, calling back behind her. “We have a television and we can have anything you would like. I heard that there is even the eighth episode of Star Wars.” She popped her head out, showing Eve the remote control. “Though I have not seen the other seven episodes. Do you think that is an issue?”

“The only people in the universe who have never seen Star Wars are the characters in Star Wars,” Eve joked. Villanelle’s face fell lightly. “Can I have some help?”

She was wheeled to the king bed’s side and the blonde filtered her hands behind her back and under her legs, lifting her effortlessly before placing her down on the sheets. Eve patted the comforter, sighing. 

“Do you want morphine?”

Eve watched her companion. “You’re not going to shoot your shot?” Villanelle hummed, shrugged, and pushed her way to one of the windows. She parted the curtains and peered outside. “Not too sexy with the bum leg, I’m guessing.”

The blonde _tsk_ed. “Do not put yourself down like that. It is merely a flesh wound.”

“And it is your fault after all, it’s not like you can be mad at me for it.” Eve picked at her bloodied bandages. “What happened to us?” 

Villanelle turned her head away from the window to look at her, letting her confusion etch itself on her tired face. Eve hadn’t noticed she was so tired. “What?”

Eve clipped a sigh, but it softened out. “When did this reversal of roles happen?” Villanelle’s eyes narrowed. “When did it become Eve on the run, Villanelle saving the day from the big and bad wolf? Me more interested in your body than you, me? How did we get _here_?”

The girl’s response was harsh but her voice was unusually soft. “When you broke my heart, Eve. I warned you then, several times.”

Eve ignored her, gaze on the ceiling. “I can’t believe you killed Carolyn.”

The blonde laughed lightly, knuckles tight and white as she gripped the curtain. “Did you think I wanted Carolyn after me forever? You, I could have one day shaken off, one leg at a time, but that hag?” 

“I led you straight to her.” A pause, a smile. “That’s brilliant.” 

“Thank you,” Villanelle preened. “Quite the knockout after so many weeks in the ring, hmm?”

“I’m K.O.ed,” Eve admitted. “But, what now?”

“A beautiful view with a beautiful woman, no? Some champagne, some discarded clothes.”

“I’m serious, Villanelle.”

The girl smiled. “So am I. My offer still stands.”

“What?”

“Anywhere you want, whenever you want, my money.” A small shrug. “All that is missing is you.” 

“You’ve never settled before, Villanelle. Not for a place, not for a person,” Eve said. “That’s a scary thought.” Her head hung low. “I don’t think I can keep doing this anymore. I’m tired. Of running. After you, away from you. Traveling is great, but I need some kind of anchor. I don’t know if you can be that anchor.”

“I came for you.”

“You came for Carolyn.”

“And you,” Villanelle stressed. “I could have left you there, do not forget.”

Eve smiled and tapped her thigh. “You owed me, to be fair.” She resettled herself in the bed, grunting, but waved the girl away when she came to help. “I’m a complex woman, but I’m a simple woman, too. I need reassurance. How can I be sure I’m not a whimsical fancy? That you’ll have me until I’ve bored you and then I’ll be thrown away? I can’t be a throwaway, Villanelle, not ever again.”

“My offer stood then, it stands now, is that not enough?” Villanelle said. “The most expensive bed in all of Kiev, as soon as you’re ready the best physical therapy in the world-“

“But those are _things_, Villanelle! Things don’t mean anything at the end of the day!” Eve pleaded. “I need you to need me, I need to be a constant in your life. I don’t care if you never murder again, I don’t care if you murder every day for the rest of your life, but I do care about my place in that life. I was thrown away once, very easily, and that _gutted_ me. I know you felt the same when Anna betrayed you. You have to know where I’m coming from?”

Villanelle sat heavily on the edge of the bed and fiddled with the edges of a fringed blanket. Her head fell forward, chin against her chest. “I, I am not able to feel what I am not able to feel, in accordance with my diagnosis. All things are just that, things. All people are just that.” She swallowed. “Things.” She looked up, gaze wet, lips turned down. 

Eve shifted and struggled to Villanelle’s side, pulling her leg along and grimacing. Villanelle watched her, wide-eyed. The woman huffed, laughed lightly to diffuse the situation, but sobered quickly. She placed her fingertips to Villanelle’s chin, asking to be focused on. 

“What I’m asking is,” Eve murmured. “Can I be your most favorite thing? The one thing you’d never get rid of?”

The blonde’s teeth rolled against each other, making a ruckus of a sound and she was crying openly now, her shoulders shaking. She searched for Eve’s hand in the blankets and kissed the back of the woman’s knuckles, one at a time. “I do not know.”

Eve sighed and her forehead found Villanelle’s. She wiped at stray tears, shushing the girl. “Thank you.”

Villanelle sobbed out a laugh. “Why?”

“For your honesty.”

“Is it that rare?” 

Eve smiled. 

Kissing a sopping wet girl, she would have thought the kiss would be softer, shorter, but Villanelle kissed her with every emotion she didn’t have. Walls built back up as quickly as they had been torn down, all the work done in tandem with rage. And Eve couldn’t help but think that she liked this Villanelle better. She didn’t know how to handle Oksana. 

And then she was pushed back to the pillows and Villanelle was hovering above her, fingers deftly working at the bottom of her shirt. Pulling, and pulling, and pulling until it was over her head and thrown to the floor. Villanelle’s gaze was everywhere and nowhere simultaneously, mouth open as she took in Eve’s chest, devoid of a bra. She glanced up and waited for the ex-agent to nod before quickly moving to erect nipples with tongue and fingers shaking in anticipation. And Villanelle kept moving down, quickly and effectively. Her goal obvious. The joggers on the floor. 

Eve’s head fell back and her eyes closed and she basked in her own glory and breathed in sharply when her body screamed at her to. The electrical shocks running from her groin to her eyelids made her want to cut a thin line starting at the edges of her lips and running up to her ears. And suddenly she wanted to peel the skin up from there in inch wide strips, over her rounded cheekbones and up to where her forehead met her scalp, just to relieve the adrenaline shooting through her. Just to let some of that energy escape her from somewhere. Another shudder ran through her and now she dug her short and jagged nails into long blonde hair. It was too much, too quickly.

And it didn’t escape her that neither of them made much noises. Wasn’t that for people who cared about each other?

Eve kept her grunts low, gravelly, and Villanelle,

It almost seemed like Villanelle was making a kill.

She was focused, her eyebrows knotted tight above her flaming hazel eyes, a gaze that didn’t lift from Eve’s own face. She watched her prey, even now. And she made no noise. No pleasure, no disdain, nothing was obvious to anyone but her and Eve wasn’t even sure the girl knew how she was feeling. She’d tightened her arms around Eve’s thighs, splayed and flattened her long fingers on Eve’s abdomen and ran marks that threatened to bleed. She had her mouth latched to Eve’s cunt, tongue dancing to an opera only she could hear.

She didn’t move, just tightened her grip on Eve when the Korean woman shifted. Eve didn’t know what it was she was doing with her tongue or her lips or her teeth but it made her want to gut Villanelle from bellybutton to throat and find refuge in the cavity of her body. Maybe then the tension in her lungs would deescalate. Villanelle was murdering her from the inside out. Eve’s eyes were tearing up, it felt so good. Whatever it was that she was doing. She heard a quick slip against her cunt, the noise of a mouth reattaching and for a moment she thought she heard a moan from the Russian. It felt like a dream. The girl’s nails, manicured and well kept, were running half-moon indents into Eve’s skin and she welcomed it; it offset the pain in her lower belly, the shame. The guilt. The endless euphoria of it all.

When she came it was a silent bargain between her and the woman between her legs, ravishing and taking and eating her soul and keeping it in between greedy claws. She was spent and she was sure her dues were too. She would go to Chiron without gold dripping over her eyelids, but from between her legs. 

Eve used her core muscles, aching and sore and splitting at the edges, to switch their positions, dragging Villanelle up by under her arms to have her level with her. They struggled momentarily to get comfortable with Eve’s cast. Villanelle’s face was shiny with her juices, from chin to just below her nose and running up her cheeks. Eve couldn’t help herself: she bent down and licked and kissed her cum off of Villanelle and now she was sure the girl grunted against her. She pushed and prodded inside the hollow crematorium of Villanelle’s mouth. She tasted faintly of toothpaste and more of spit and cum and Eve bit her lower lip to blood and Villanelle did the same to her. It mixed together in a tangy sweet cacophony. 

She used her fingers to invade Villanelle, deciding that if the taste of the girl compelled her the faces she made did even more. Villanelle was hard on her: she set her jaw and steeled her gaze and stared her down from below her and wouldn’t give Eve what she wanted. She didn’t flinch, she made no sounds, she just took the pounding of Eve’s three fingers between her legs in a steady rhythm and rocked with it, clenching around the agent’s hand. Her cunt betrayed her, she soaked Eve and the sheets beneath them, clenched tight. 

Villanelle suddenly closed her eyes, her fists curling at her sides and Eve sat up for a moment to take her hands, leading them to rest on her hair.

The blonde gasped, eyes flashing open and she tugged Eve back down, their noses flirting as she puffed out, their breaths mingling and her fingers anchored in glorious black curls. Triumphantly Eve fucked her harder, coaxing Villanelle’s legs to close around her waist, trapping them against her. Swallowing her. She wanted to reach in, stretch past her cervix, tear her uterus out and dangle it in front of her like a prize. She wondered if she whispered her thoughts to Villanelle if she would be told to do it. 

Villanelle’s hands traveled down her back to dig into the back of her hips, bruising, trying to coax noises out of Eve. She was furious now, furious that Eve had made her break her silent vow whilst she kept it going. 

And suddenly the game had changed; Villanelle was loud, then loudest, twisting under Eve and begging and moaning to where Eve was fighting the blush rushing up her neck, feeding off of her embarrassment. Their treaty of silence broken and turned into a war, the Russian’s battalions crying for triumph.

“Eve,” the girl spoke. “Eve, please.” Her companion began to pause, unsure of the sudden change in demeanor but Villanelle coaxed her closer so that their chests matched, tightening her thighs around her hips. Eve only fell farther into her and Villanelle purred, biting and licking at the woman’s ear. “Fuck me, _please_.”

“Villanelle-“

The blonde’s lips met her partner’s. “Fuck me like you mean it, Eve. Tell me how much you hate me.”

“Vil-“

“I will never be yours,” Villanelle murmured. She threw her head back, neck arched and Eve followed her veins with her teeth. “You hate me, show me you hate me.”

Eve’s fingers paused, nestled in warm heat, and Villanelle’s gaze slid down her long nose, eyebrows quirked in question. “I don’t.”

The girl huffed. “What?”

“I don’t hate you.”

Villanelle’s teeth outgrew her smile and she kissed Eve soundly and her hips began to move again and she fucked herself around Eve, moaning deliciously. Her cunt tightened around Eve’s fingers and when she came it was a throaty cry for Eve to _keep going, keep going, fuck me_-

Afterwards, they held each other under the sheets, the cool air from the sliding window doors filtering in. 

“I love you.”

Eve turned her head and searched Villanelle’s face, her tender green eyes and the way they were starting to close with the shift of their afterglow pulsing through their veins. “No,” Eve said softly, moving to be closer to the girl. She encompassed the lioness beneath her wool, tucking her head beneath her chin. “You don’t.”

Villanelle smiled and laughed lightly against her collarbone, settling deep inside her haze. “It was worth a try.”


	19. Was Just Another Way to Scream your Name

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'm sorry about the delay for this last chapter! I've started a new full-time job so my writing was done sentence by sentence haha
> 
> Thank you all for sticking so long with me and this story; I hope you've enjoyed the ride!  
Love you all!

“Will you _please_ just slow down!”

Twenty feet ahead, Villanelle stopped abruptly. Her head fell back, face turned up to the heavens and Eve could see her breath misting in the morning air. The ex-agent let herself rest for a moment, hands on her knees and an eye trained on the assassin. 

They had spent their two nights in that hotel like royalty; served every hour of the day by room service and rotating between lounging in the gold adorned couches and the jacuzzi attached to the master bedroom. But the luxury ended as quickly as it had come for Eve, worry worming her way into her dreams. Serenaded out of bed at eight o’clock by panic on their last morning in and helping herself to the laptop, a poisoned gift of Villanelle’s, she had begun to type feverishly. 

Maybe she hadn’t learned Russian when hired, or anytime in between then and her predicaments now, but she could at least tell Cyrillic letters apart. With some guesses in between. 

“Belarus, dear Eve?”

“Don’t _do_ that!”

Villanelle’s owlish eyes had regarded Eve, stunned yet amused. “Do what?”

Eve’d sneered and Villanelle had kissed her there, roughly, as if she were a man. It hadn’t erased the scowl from her companion’s face. The blonde had helped herself to the day old and cold coffee, left in an expensive gold rimmed cup on the low table, next to the laptop. She’d hissed lightly at the taste but continued to drink greedily. 

“I hardly think we’re safe here,” Eve had said. Villanelle’s eyebrow had raised, and she’d turned back to her open internet browser. “We should go north, through Belarus, maybe to Scandinavia.”

“Danish police are very friendly with the Dutch authorities.”

“Not Denmark, then,” the ex-agent had replied dryly. “Anywhere else you’d like to nix now, to save me the time?”

“Up north?” Villanelle had feigned thoughtfulness then. “I do not think so.”

Outside, police sirens had wailed down the street, car after car and ambulances following. 

“Tick tock,” the assassin had muttered. 

In the forest a day later, tired and aching from every joint in her body, Eve wanted to vomit down on the cold ground. 

Villanelle turned, hands balled into fists. “You are slow, Eve.”

The woman’s head snapped up. “I know!” 

“You wanted to do this,” the girl reminded her.

“I know,” Eve breathed. “Just give me a fucking minute. This is your fault.”

Villanelle watched her carefully, and with nothing to add, walked to Eve’s side and slotted her arm under the woman’s armpit to pull her upwards. Back to her feet. Her breath tickled Eve’s ear who shivered lightly. It was the wind, she told herself. 

“One step after the other, Eve,” the blonde murmured. “Let me carry your weight.”

Eve let herself relax and she began to drag her cast leg again. 

“This will take some time,” Villanelle sighed, not unkindly. “Walking to the great North. You will have to talk to me.”

“You’re so good at talking, why don’t you do it.”

A shrug. “I am busy keeping you up.”

Eve scoffed and she steeled her gaze on the horizon. 

The railroad they walked was long, had been and would be. Three days they’d trudged the path great iron engineers used to take; a network written the century before and now abandoned and left for Eve and Villanelle to use as their own yellow brick road. Nights, they spent under the thick cover of extreme weather tents purchased by the assassin, under the stars and in the blistering wind. The canvas and both sleeping bags were attached at Villanelle’s back, roped over the backpack the girl had filled with food and water bottles (the rivers around here, post-communism, couldn’t be healthy, she’d parroted). They kept their cash and credit cards close for the next village they’d encounter, four days from then. 

Villanelle hadn’t been very happy to trace the pencil line Eve had drawn on their map with her own finger. She’d expected planes, trains, anything where she could put her feet up and certainly not their bareboned trails. She’d disappeared that afternoon and Eve had waited hours for her in the luxurious palace room turned self-made prison, in the dark and in deepening worry. She’d reappeared with everything they’d need. 

Hours later, Eve stopped abruptly and Villanelle, tugged back, turned to watch her questioningly. Eve sighed. Her breath fogged in front of her and she imagined herself a dragon, flying far away from the cold ground. “I need a moment.” She waited, almost patiently, as Villanelle trudged around her to set up their tent against the railroad and Eve wondered if the girl did indeed have those cat-like eyes. She moved in the dark effortlessly and lowered Eve into their newfound cocoon. 

Inside their refuge made of canvas, the wind howled in every direction and buffeted the liquid walls into them.

“I have painkillers.”

“You’d want me disabled _and_ addicted?” the woman joked.

“It would not be in my best interest,” Villanelle said. “I do not want to carry you everywhere.” She stretched her fingers. They were stiff. 

Eve reached out and the blonde gave over her hand carefully, ready to pull back at any moment. Her hazel eyes closed as the remaining fingers on her damaged hand were massaged with tenderness and purpose. She leaned into Eve, fell into her, and let herself be lulled to sleep until the dawn. 

“Do you know how the Twelve payed Raymond?” Villanelle asked a week later. Eve’s spine arched at the name, panic tingled straight into her ears. The girl saw and smiled. “Carolyn is payed the same way.” She was as chipper as she had always been and Eve felt more and more haggard next to her.

“She doesn’t work for the Twelve,” she replied. “Didn’t.”

“I did not say she did.”

The ex-agent’s chest ached and she sighed. “Molding and throwing away. Will you ever be done rubbing me in my own shit?” 

Villanelle hummed and later that night she fucked Eve within an inch of her life, anger curbed in the moment but let out in inappropriate words and deafening silence. A coping mechanism, if Eve had ever felt philosophical, but with the wind through the pine trees and the blonde between her legs it didn’t matter.

For many more miles Villanelle shouldered Eve up as they walked and carried most of the weight on her shoulders and Eve couldn’t help but think of her when she was younger; determination the same in her eyes. Since the cold, lonely seas of the North, against Dover’s white cliffs during the worst of tempests, Villanelle had aged considerably and it showed in the corners of her face. 

It was the blonde that crawled into villages when they passed them, one dirt alley town after the other that provided dried and salted meats that Eve could barely chew through and that Villanelle ate like she’d been raised on the stuff. 

Hadn’t she been?

Villanelle’s eyelashes were coated in soft-falling snow and when she blinked they melted on her cheeks. “Where are we?”

“Oh.” Eve cleared her throat and pulled her backpack off one shoulder and swung it around to her stomach. She rifled through its contents to find her map; it was unbelievably large and when she unfurled it this time it was to Villanelle’s sneer. Sometimes, the girl found it endearing. “There’s a river, then a tunnel, a bridge. We just follow the rails.”

“Follow the rails, follow the rails. It is all we have been doing.”

“It’s what we have to do, Villanelle.”

“I need a shower. A real one.”

“We’re almost over the border. I promise, once we’re out of the country we can use roads again. You can shower again.” Eve struggled to fold her map. “These abandoned railroads are the best way to stay off radar.”

A day along and the wind carried the river’s frigidness and Eve’s ears and nose turned red and Villanelle stayed stoic. Years in Paris pretending to be someone else hadn’t changed her core temperature. She was a snake, a Komodo dragon. Just a dragon. The tunnel, almost two kilometers long, helped a bit with the cold but it was the darkness that did Eve in now; she held on tightly to Villanelle’s hand as they passed beneath a mountain, the pressure of a million years right on her shoulders. What would take an engine mere seconds to pass through was an obstacle for Eve and her injuries and she felt unfathomably small. 

“Do you know how many hours I spent looking for you?” Eve whispered. Her voice echoed down and rumbled back. “How many days?” Villanelle’s eyes pierced the back of her skull like a laser through infinite space. She wanted her brains to paint the tunnel walls. “A shit ton of time.”

“Did you, now.” Villanelle kept her gaze forward, on the light at the end. She tried to seem disinterested, but her body language was off. She wanted to hear more about obsessions and time spent on them. 

Eve was more than happy to indulge her. “I wanted to become you, be you. I wanted to anticipate your next move.”

Villanelle’s eyebrow raised suggestively.

The sun hit hard and Eve closed her eyes in reflex. She breathed in the air, so much different than what had been stale before. She sighed. 

“I killed, Villanelle.”

“You did. Quite messily, too. I applaud you for the show.” Villanelle traipsed up ahead and Eve watched after her in wonder, as always. Villanelle dramatically looked over the sides of the bridge they walked on, whistling low and listening to it echo down the valley. The river below was far, three hundred feet down and swimming a lazy and rocky path. The bridge itself, old and wooden but sturdy beneath their feet, stretched out before them for a few miles before disappearing into a forest across the canyon. It was just the rails and nothing else. Barely a foot of free room on each side and no safety barriers was a testament to how old the construction was. 

Villanelle met Eve’s gaze, flawless and giving away nothing. 

They walked and then, as the sun began to fall across the sky, deep from within the mountain behind them and cloaked in darkness, a train whistled low and high and far. The two women stopped, open jackets threatening to fly away with the wind on their lone rock.

Villanelle turned to watch the tunnel but Eve stayed still, frozen and searching the for the blonde’s eyes. 

The girl was oddly calm. “There is a train, Eve.”

“You said once,” Eve spoke over the wind. “That we were the same.”

Villanelle gripped the woman’s arm, green eyes harsh. 

“You said we were the same,” Eve repeated, and she tugged and the blonde faltered forward before righting herself. They invaded each other’s spaces, faces inches from each other’s and imitating a bright summer morning in Italy. 

“We are not,” Villanelle breathed back. “Is what you said.”

“We’re about to be.”

Villanelle’s head tilted back, lips parting in a wolfish smile of pure delight as she watched Eve. “See, I had wondered why you were taking so long on that morning, with the computer. I had put it to you double and triple-checking everything, like usual.” Her gaze spared up and over the woman’s shoulder at the mountain trees shaking. “I would never have guessed it was possible to find any old railroad still in use, much less their time slots, and yet, you went through all this trouble for me?”

The bridge beneath their feet rattled harder and harder, the wood groaning and creaking terribly. 

“You deserve the best, Villanelle. You always have.”

“I do,” the blonde admitted smugly. She leaned in closer, lifting her free hand to twirl her fingers in black curls. “This is very sweet of you, Eve, I did not think you capable of such things.”

Their foreheads touched and they breathed the same air and Villanelle’s hand fell to hold onto Eve’s fingers, bringing them up so she could kiss each knuckle as her green eyes bore into black ones. Eve kissed her sweetly then, on the cheek. They shifted and they held their balance together as the train came into view. 

She couldn’t hear the girl over the train whistle blaring momentarily but she read her lips, the three words murmured through rose tinted lips covering sharp teeth now dulled that once could have torn her throat out. Another long, shrill whistle and Villanelle glanced at the river down below. 

Eve looked too and then pulled her close, held her in a vice tight grip. “If you move from this spot, I will find you.”

Villanelle smiled.


End file.
